Who Owns America's Past?: The Smithsonian and the Problem of History

Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History Book Award of the National Council on Public History

In 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B—29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest such complex in the world, the Smithsonian...