110. Revisiting The ‘Enola Gay Fiasco’ Today

Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.

For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties.

But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb."

In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians.

Today, as a new presidential executive order dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history, we realize the "Enola Gay Fiasco" isn't just a cautionary tale—it's the blueprint for a more aggressive campaign to justify anything.

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Central to the Enola Gay fiasco is the tension between a museums as a collection and museums as a narrative -- moving beyond technological celebration toward contextual interpretation. Across the National Mall from the National Air and Space Museum, the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History has been able to transition from the taxonomy-focused "Hall of Extinct Monsters" to today's narrative-driven "Deep Time". As exhibitions developer Ben Miller noted about the Fossil Hall evolution in episode 66, designers eventually recognized exhibitions should exist "more for the public, rather than being a showroom for the collections."

Archipelago at the Movies🍿 "The Simpsons" Uncut Femmes (2021)

Some of the best episodes of the Simpsons take place at a museum, but this one takes place at two: a World War II battleship, on which Marge gets stuck chaperoning an overnight field trip, and the Museum of Generational Wealth, which plays host to the annual Gen Gala.

In this episode, Rebecca Reibstein enlightens me about the Met Gala and unpacks the concept of camp, while we continue to refine the beats and twists of our own museum heist.

109. The Rise and Fall of Enterprise Square, USA

Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.

For the last few decades of the 20th century, if you visited Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, you could have been serenaded by a barbershop quartet of audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders as framed on U.S. currency. This was one of the many exhibits at Enterprise Square, USA, a high-tech museum dedicated to teaching children about Free Market Economics. The museum, which found itself out of money almost before it opened, shut down in 1999.

Barrett Huddleston first encountered these exhibits as a wide-eyed elementary school student in the 1980s, mesmerized by the talking puppets, giant electronic heads, and interactive displays that taught how regulation stifled freedom. Years later, he returned as a tour guide during the museum's final days, maintaining those same animatronics with duct tape and wire cutters, and occasionally being squeezed inside the two-dollar bill to repair Thomas Jefferson.

He joins us to explore this collision of education, ideology, and visitor experience, and how the former museum shapes his own approach to teaching children today.

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I keep coming back to this early Museum Archipelago episode, where I interviewed Julie Garcia about her thesis titled Faith Displayed As Science: The Role of The Creation Museum in the Modern Creationist Movement. We explored how creationist museums like the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum co-opt the language and display techniques of science museums to legitimize biblical literalism.

Archipelago at the Movies🍿 "The Simpsons" Uncut Femmes (2021)

Some of the best episodes of the Simpsons take place at a museum, but this one takes place at two: a World War II battleship, on which Marge gets stuck chaperoning an overnight field trip, and the Museum of Generational Wealth, which plays host to the annual Gen Gala.

In this episode, Rebecca Reibstein enlightens me about the Met Gala and unpacks the concept of camp, while we continue to refine the beats and twists of our own museum heist.

108. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life

Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.

The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.

The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.

The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.

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Visiting the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life in Germany, I could see instantly that such a space is still missing from the Bulgarian museum landscape. That doesn't mean there's no progress: one of the projects is to turn the Bulgarian Communist Party Meeting House, Buzludzha, into a storytelling platform.

This episode explores the process of creating a space where Bulgaria can collectively reflect on its past and future--a space vast enough to accommodate diverse experiences and multiple visions of what lies ahead.

Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Museum Town

Museum Town is documentary about North Adams, Massachusetts and the story of how the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art came to be there. Anya van Wagtendonk, Wisconsin Public Radio's state Capitol reporter and a native of the Berkshires, joins me to discuss this documentary and the promise of museums as engines of economic development.

107. Crypto and Museums Part 1

Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.

While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.

Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

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In this episode, we use the British Museum as the example of the ‘power era’ of museums. The story of the museum’s early years centers around collector Hans Sloane, who assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world. Funded by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, Sloane’s collection became the basis for the British Museum. In episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum discusses how Sloane’s idea of universal public access to his collections is still the standard today.

Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Museums in King of the Hill

The artificial leg of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna has been held by an Illinois museum for over a century. On Season 2, Episode 18 of King of the Hill, "The Final Shinsult", the Arlen Museum plays host to the war trophy as the last "leg" of the tour before it is repatriated to Mexico, and some of the characters are not happy about it.

Today on Archipelago at the Movies, Ashira Morris and I discuss how museums are presented in the King of the Hill universe, with a focus on "The Final Shinsult" and Season 3, Episode 18's "Love Hurts and So Does Art".

106. Last Call on 'The Streets of Old Milwaukee'

Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.

I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures.

And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust.

In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed, the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving.

Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen

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I interviewed Dr. Ellen Censky on one of the first episodes of Museum Archipelago back in 2015. She was Academic Dean of the MPM at the time, and she highlighted the attention to detail across the museum's exhibits, like the snake button on Bison Hunt on Horseback or The Streets of Old Milwaukee as one of the reasons why the museum punches above its weight.

Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Toy Story 2 (1999)

After spending the first movie accepting the possibility that he might have to share his kid's love, Woody discovers he is a valuable collectible from a once-popular TV show and faces the possibility of being of being preserved forever in a museum.

The dramatic tension of the movie only works if the decision to go to the Konishi Toy Museum feels like a believable option — an eternity of “watching kids from behind glass and never be loved again” or a few years of being played with before inevitably being discarded.

Join Joe Murphy, host of the excellent Uncultured Universe Podcast, and me as we dive deep into the existential museum themes of this flawless film.