The collective memory of the atomic bombings misrecognized as objective history: The case of the public opposition to the national air and space museum's atom bomb exhibit

Abstract

The recent controversy over the National Air and Space Museum's challenge to the widely held collective memory of the atomic bombings at the close of World War II presents an opportunity to explore contemporary rhetorical implications of how the justification for the use of nuclear weapons against human populations is presented in public history. This essay examines the U.S. American cultural struggle over the memory of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Critics of the National Air and Space Museum's planned atomic bomb exhibit denuded the credibility of the exhibit's message as well as the authority of professional historians to address the historic event in public space. This study addresses the public critics’ rhetorical strategy against the planned exhibit, and the misrecognition, in one public sphere, of the collective national memory of the bombings as the objective history. The analysis discusses the dangers of such a closed history and of limiting technical “experts,” professional historians, from informing the U.S. American cultural memory of the bombings through public historical representations. The essay concludes that since collective judgments of the past are important characteristics of contemporary and future deliberations, the unreflective celebration of the atomic attacks is a warning that as a democratic society we have grappled inadequately with the meanings of the atomic bombings.