At a moment when including up-to-date scholarship had just established itself as a building block of best practice, The West as America and the Enola Gay called the whole role of scholars in public history into question. The timing of the furor created serious problems for the practice of public history overall. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian website.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The museums, individual staff, and outside scholars associated with the exhibits suffered damaged credibility, blighted careers, and several years of humiliating attack in the media and on the floor of Congress. At both museums, portions of the audience, media reviewers and some funders objected strenuously to interpretation they perceived as unpatriotic, incomplete, and tendentious. While it may seem tiresome to return to old debates, the field’s growing focus on audiences, interactivity, and participatory scaffolding (to borrow from Nina Simon) highlights unplumbed learning value in those 1990s experiences.īut recalling them can hardly be pleasant.
Public historians took a battering 20 years ago through highly public struggles over two Smithsonian exhibits, The West as America at the National Museum of American Art (1991) and the Enola Gayat the National Air and Space Museum (1995).
