The controversy stemmed over how American history should be presented. The exhibit started out as an exhibit for the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of World War II. The exhibit became tangled in controversy from the beginning. I soon learned that the exhibit got caught up in a debate about what is history and whether history should simply be a comemoration of the past or if history should be interpreted and debated. When I heard that there was a controversy over the original exhibit I wondered how it came about that something that left such a huge impact on the twentieth century could have such a barebones exhibit. I have seen the exhibit of the Enola Gay,the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima in August 1945 at the National Air and Space Museum. Unlike other exhibits from the Smithsonian Institutes it did not leave much of an impression.
