How have curators responded to the 1995 controversy over the National Air and Space Museum's Enola Gay exhibit? Trends in curatorial practice since then offer opportunities for museum professionals who wish to question the costs of wars. Curators now believe that museum exhibits should be open-ended and also should reflect a multiplicity of views about a given subject. Their main strategy is to evoke a variety of memories among museum goers without trying to integrate them completely - collecting memories rather than collectivizing them. Far more challenging for museums is representing the larger social categories that shape peacetime lives as well. They have greatest difficulty with representing the experiences of foreigners. Yet, many Americans have never been comfortable with the official A-bomb narrative. If, as museum professionals now emphasize, visitors are bringing their own meaning to exhibits, display of the Enola Gay will forever provide an invitation to debate the moral and strategic legitimacy of the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.

Laura Hein specializes in the history of Japan in the 20th century and its international relations. She is author of Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth Century Japan (University of California Press, 2004), which explores various ways in which economic expertise intersected with politics through a study of the lives of a tight-knit group of Japanese intellectuals. She also has a strong interest in problems of remembrance and public memory, resulting in three co-edited books with Mark Selden: Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (1997), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (2000), and Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to American and Japanese Power (2003). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.