There, I had first heard curatorial decisions attacked and derided as 'politically correct history,' and as a craven caving in to 'special interests' but there, too, I had watched as a complex interpretation of a mythic American event had successfully supplanted an enduring 'first take.' Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a historic site where different-often clashing-stories could be told. After all, for many years I had studied battles over battlefield memorialization, clashes over 'sacred ground.' In the late 1980s, I had spent much time with National Park Service personnel as they struggled to transform the Little Bighorn battlefield from a shrine to George A.
When, in the fall of 1993, Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), asked me to serve on an advisory committee for that museum's upcoming Enola Gay exhibit, I was excited.
