"FullText" links provide a connection to electronic or print copies provided by the Lehigh Libraries and other services, such as electronic abstracts and interlibrary loan requesting.

6/1995. Sampling of coverage in June by major media.

"Are We Out of Step with History," U. S. Catholic, June 1995, 45-48. Comparisons with the Holocaust Museum and a Disney theme park: "There is no simple way to commemorate morally complex historical events." [FullText]

"The Fiasco at the Smithsonian," by Morton A. Kaplan, World and I, June 1995, 16-18. "Those officials should be fired. Academic freedom was never a proper issue. Academics have freedom to express idiosyncratic viewpoints in their own publications. National exhibits, in contrast, should present balanced views." [FullText]

"The Smithsonian and the Enola Gay," by Wilcomb Washburn, National Interest, Summer 1995: 40-49. "The Smithsonian's newer curators, sensitive to the condescension or condemnation of their university colleagues for representing an institution whose exhibits were considered celebratory rather than critical, technical rather than interpretive, gradually shifted their emphasis to match the approach of their academic colleagues. From an ideological point of view that shift usually meant moving to the political left and to a view of the United States as more often than not the cause of the world's problems." [FullText]

"The Enola Gay and Japan's Struggle to Surrender," by Alvin D. Coox, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 4.2 (Summer 1995): 161-68. "A new generation of 'revisionists' or 'neo-revisionists' has emerged that was not directly involved in the events of 1945, being unborn or pubescent at the time. . . . revisionist researchers and critics have been able to seize the initiative ideologically from the rather silent but knowledgeable majority." [FullText]

6/1995. "50 Years after Hiroshima," symposium in Dissent, Summer 1995

Jean Bethke Elshtain: "My hunch is that how we remember and what we remember of events in midcentury is bound to be altered. The civic energy that sustained our dominant 'reading' of events is depleted. Hiroshima seems long ago and far away."

John Rawls: "I believe that both the fire-bombings of Japanese cities . . . and the later atomic bombings . . . were very great wrongs. . . . [and] I set out what I think to be the [six] principles governing the conduct of war -- jus in bello -- of democratic peoples. . . . Certainly war is a kind of hell, but why should that mean that all moral distinctions cease to hold. . . . There is never a time when we are free from all moral and political principles and restraints."

Ronald Takaki: "The Cold War explanation, however, overlooks the significance of race in America's history as well as in the decision to drop the bomb. . . . As a young man, Harry Truman had harbored prejudices. . . . [He] had little in his social and intellectual experiences to challenge his stereotypes and prejudices."

Michael Walzer: "Official apologies somehow seem an inadequate, perhaps even a perfunctory way of [admitting and confronting wrong]. Better, I think, that the U.S. government devote itself to creating the conditions for nuclear disarmament or, more immediately, to stopping the slaughter of civilians in places where we have influence or power."