Instead, the culture wars have given rise to a new climate for debate, one in which personal conviction based on strong emotions far outweigh any well-reasoned argument based on logic and dispassionate research. This dissertation will argue that the controversy, as part of the wider culture wars, helped lead to a rejection of such notions as compromise and settling disputes through reasoned debate in American political and cultural discourse. This dissertation therefore seeks to understand how the controversy related to, and had had an impact upon, other debates in the culture wars such as those surrounding provocative art, sexual orientation, and the teaching of history in US schools. Although this is certainly part of the story, there has been no serious attempt at establishing the location of the controversy within the wider cultural battles in the US.
The resulting dispute has traditionally been understood as a clash between commemorative and critical voices in the US.
The controversy surrounded the preparations for an exhibit of the Enola Gay – the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. This dissertation seeks to place the so-called Enola Gay controversy of 1994-5 into the wider context of the culture wars in the United States.
