ABSTRACT
A pair of still-smouldering exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution of Washington provide the occasion to consider defensive epistemologies available to historians and curators whose scholarly representations of the past come under fire. Science in American Life opened at the National Museum of American History in April 1994, to mixed reviews: some believe that the exhibition superbly shows the interactions between science and American society since the 1860s; others believe that it concentrates on the risks and horrors engendered by science while giving short shrift to its benefits. Across the mall at the National Air and Space Museum, an exhibition planned as The Crossroads: The End of World War II, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War was never built. It was to have displayed the Enola Gay (from whose bomb bay the atomic age was born) as the pivotal moment between hot war and Cold, revisiting the justification for dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while also considering its legacy-from the immediate victims to ‘mutually assured destruction’. After contentious fits and starts, the Enola Gay’s fuselage eventually made it into the Air and Space Museum in June 1995, but relatively naked, wrapped only in a video showing pilots and crew.
