A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral. Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.
Museum Archipelago
Claim This Podcastby Ian Elsner
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A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral. Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.
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Recent Episodes
March 2, 2026
112. In Relooted, You Steal Back What Museums Won't Return
<p>It's 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/" rel="nofollow">Relooted</a>, a new video game from South African game studio <a href="https://nyamakop.co.za/" rel="nofollow">Nyamakop</a>, where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan.</p> <p>But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return.</p> <p>In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them.</p> <p>Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing.</p> <h3>Topics and Notes</h3> <ul> <li>00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago</li> <li>00:15 <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/" rel="nofollow">Relooted</a></li> <li>01:30 <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK95EYLK-lV/" rel="nofollow">"We overstated the security capabilities on museums"</a></li> <li>01:45 Meet Ben Myers</li> <li>02:50 Meet Mohale Mashigo</li> <li>03:04 The Kabwe Skull</li> <li>04:45 Labels and Missing Context in Museums</li> <li>06:08 A Digital Museum</li> <li>06:53 Treaties and Red Tape</li> <li>09:37 Prosperous Future Africa</li> <li>12:05 <a href="https://www.museumarchipelago.com/39" rel="nofollow">Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum on Episode 39</a></li> <li>12:16 Museum of Black Civilizations</li> <li>14:50 <a href="http://jointhemuseum.club/" rel="nofollow">Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖</a></li> </ul> <div id="clubnew"> <center><h3><a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago">DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️</a></h3></center> <div class="row"> <div class="column right">Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. <p> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago" class="ma-cta-button">Join Club Archipelago</a> <p class="ma-trial-info">Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.</p></div> <div class="column final"> Your Club Archipelago membership includes: <ul class="ma-feature-list"> <li>🎙️<strong>Access to a private podcast</strong> that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.</li> <li>🎟️<strong><i> Archipelago at the Movies</i></strong>, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.</li> <li>✨<strong>A warm feeling</strong> knowing you're helping make this show possible.</li> </ul> </ul></div> </div> <p></div></p> <h3>Transcript</h3> <p>Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.</p></p> <div class="wrap-collabsible"> <input id="collapsible" class="toggle" type="checkbox"> <label for="collapsible" class="lbl-toggle">View Transcript</label> <div class="collapsible-content"> <div class="content-inner"> <div> <p>It's the year 2099 and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high security museum to steal the Kabwe skull. This moment occurs halfway through Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop.</p> <p>Your job is to map all the entrances and exits, position your crew members strategically, use cybersecurity techniques to break open the door, steal this artifact, and make it out of the museum past the robot security force using parkour, which fortunately, you're quite skilled at.</p> <blockquote> <p>“Video game excerpt: " Please look out for the Kabwe skull. For many years, the Zambian government tried to have the skull repatriated back from the United Kingdom. What's the security situation? Nothing you haven't experienced before. Robot guards, lasers, security shutters, pressure plates, blah, blah, blah, blah.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Several things about this moment in the game are unrealistic. </p> <p>For one, the actual skull, which is currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might actually be easier to steal.</p> <blockquote> <p>Ben Myres: I've seen a couple of the ones in our game, in person now, and the first thing I noticed, is the Kabwe skull or broken Hillman in the Natural History Museum. That'd be very easy to steal. We've very overstated the security capabilities on museums. I have a video of, it's only 20 seconds long of the distance from the skull to the exit. I'm like, wow. Okay. That wouldn’t be very fun. </p> </blockquote> <p>This is Ben Myers, the CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and one of the developers of Relooted. </p> <blockquote> <p>Ben Myres: Hello, I'm Ben Myers, CEO, and creative director at Nyamakop. I like to be known for making cool video games. </p> </blockquote> <p>But there is a very realistic -- damningly realistic -- fact at the heart of the game. The Kabwe skull is just one of about 70 real-world objects you heist during the game. And every single one of them was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western Museum or private collection. </p> <blockquote> <p>Ben Myres: I think there was a French government report that came out in maybe 2018 and that estimated that 90 to 95% of all African cultural heritage is kept in museums off the continent.</p> <p>So the scale of it is like really absurd. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pieces. In like Western museums. So the, the major problem was like not, you know, finding artifacts, but which ones? </p> <p>Mohale Mashingo: There were so many artifacts, really. So many, but we couldn't put them all in the game. Otherwise, this would be the world's longest game. </p> </blockquote> <p>This is Mohale Mashigo, narrative director at Nyamakop and one of the developers of Relooted. </p> <blockquote> <p>Mohale Mashigo: Hi, my name is Mohale Mashigo. I'm the narrative director at Nyamakop, and I like to be known for telling great stories, living in a fishing village and having a cute dog.</p> </blockquote> <p>The Kabwe skull was discovered in 1921 by miners in the Kabwe mine in Zambia, then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. The skull is roughly 300,000 years old, predating modern humans, and was promptly shipped to the Natural History Museum in London, which at the time was a department of the British Museum.</p> <p>About ten years after Zambia became independent from colonial rule, in the early 1970s, the National Monuments Commission formally requested the skull from the museum. That hasn’t happened, and the museum's own display undermines its case for keeping the original.</p> <blockquote> <p>Ben Myres: So the Kabwe skull is interesting because Zambia has been asking back that back for quite a long time. And what was interesting about the Kabwe skull is it's surrounded by replicas. Like it's this sort of history of, you know, humanity from all these fossils and like skulls. But most of the skulls they have in that exhibition aren't. Real. So it just speaks to how like it's completely unnecessary for them to have that exact skull. When all the other ones surrounding them aren't real either. And most of the people going to the museum aren't gonna notice that anyway. </p> </blockquote> <blockquote>Mohale Mashigo: I've been to a lot of museums in Europe and have sort of seen these things, but they feel so out of context. You know, it's kind of like, this is the name of the thing, A very small writeup that it doesn't feel humanizing or it doesn't feel human. And then actually working on them in the game is, oh my goodness, this is, this is a big deal to a community of people and how it's taken is also a big deal. So being in a museum, and I love going to museums, it felt so disconnected, seeing it, but actually. Writing about it and learning about it was something entirely different.</blockquote> The Kabwe skull is one of the higher-profile repatriation cases, but many of the 70 artifacts in Relooted don't have that kind of visibility. When Ben visited the British Museum, he noticed how the quality of wall labels depends on how much public pressure a museum is under to return those artifacts. <blockquote>Ben Myers: I think the captioning around the Benin Bronzes is actually pretty good. They use the word looting, they speak about where it happened, how they got hold of it. But I think what's interesting is when there isn't that external pressure or awareness, the way museums talk about artifacts in the collection is not as great. In the far corner, away from the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, there is a display of something called an Ndome shield</blockquote> <blockquote>Mohale Mashigo: Yeah, Ndome shield from Kenya.</blockquote> <blockquote>Ben Myers: From the Kikuyu people in Kenya. We learned — we have one of them in the game — and when I was reading about the research, it became clear that these are passed down from father to son as an initiation ritual. It's a deeply personal familial object and none of that is really mentioned in the caption. It's either consciously or unconsciously getting away from the question of why do you have this and why is this here? Because if you understand that it's this deeply personal familial object, you might be a little unsettled about it being there and being displayed in the way it's displayed</blockquote> Both the Benin Bronzes and Ndome shield are artifacts you can steal back in the game. Before every heist, you and your team hold a briefing. Mohale and Ben built the game's artifact displays and dialogue to detail information about the object. <blockquote>Mohale Mashigo: We made a very conscious effort to say, this is what's so important about this artifact. How it was taken and the repercussions of it having been removed from where it's from. So in many ways yes, it's like a digital museum.</blockquote> And the fact that a heist briefing inside a video game does a better job at contextualizing these objects than the museums that currently hold them is another damning detail that the game designers didn't have to invent. In Relooted, you play as Nomali, a young woman in 2099 Johannesburg whose grandmother, Professor Grace, spent years trying to get stolen artifacts returned through official channels, and got stopped every step of the way. At the beginning of the game, she explains the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, an agreement signed by the world's powers to return stolen artifacts to African museums. <p>This Treaty is also fictional, no such agreement has been signed, but the way Professor Grace describes museums wiggling their way out of actually returning artifacts sounds very real.</p> <blockquote> <p>“Video game excerpt: There's an old clause in the treaty that uses the words public display. </p> <p>“Basically saying all artifacts that are currently on display to the public need to be returned.”</p> <p>“Museums are now using that old clause to basically remove artifacts from public display under the auspices of changing exhibits, maintenance, et cetera.They don't intend to put these artifacts back on display and are also not disclosing what they have in storage. They intend to have this on display for private viewings instead.”</p> <p>Can't give back what you don't have. </p> <p>Exactly.</p> <p>But that also means they cannot report the artifacts missing or stolen. Stolen?</p> <p>Who’s stealing them? </p> <p>Us!</p> </blockquote> <p>In the real world, these types of slow-rolling shenanigans are exactly what museums do. The British Government agreed to “negotiate” on the Kabwe skull in 2019, but no progress has been made. </p> <blockquote> <p>Ben Myers: It's so difficult to get these objects back. It's so complicated. And I think that's what it speaks to, but it also speaks to the dodgy ways they were acquired as well. Like the Kabwe skull — at the time it was taken, there was literally a British colonial law saying, do not remove human remains, do not remove cultural relics from the country. And they did that and then donated it. So even acquiring the objects sometimes broke the law that they themselves had.</p> </blockquote> <p>And the current UK defense for keeping the skull is that it's technically not human remains — it's too old to qualify — so the repatriation framework doesn't apply. So it doesn’t seem inconceivable that these museums will manage to hold on until 2099.</p> <blockquote> <p>Mohale Mashigo: There's been so much red tape, just constantly. And I thought, what if even a hundred years from now they're still doing it and they're still finding ways. Because right now it's, "you don't have enough museums" or whatever. Or "we couldn't possibly hand it over because then we'd have to hand over everything." And even if they're trying to do something, there'll always be fishy business going on. </blockquote> <p> The setting of 2099 also allowed the game designers to do something that Mohale says is rare: imagine a prosperous African future.</p> <blockquote> Mohale Mashigo: Very rarely do we have an opportunity to imagine Africa in the future. And I'm talking about Africans imagining it. Often it's like some kind of lo-fi, scrapyard junkyard or whatever. People are suffering. The world has fallen apart, but everybody's got holograms and they're selling body parts. It's always something very gruesome when people imagine Africa in the future. And we wanted to imagine a future that suited us. It was a rare opportunity for us to actually imagine a prosperous, happy Africa.</blockquote> <p>One of the reasons the game works so well is because heists are fun, and we already have a shared cultural understanding of what goes into a heist: a crew, a briefing, a plan that goes wrong. </p> <blockquote> <p>Mohale Mashigo: What I love about heist is the fact that the best heist works when it's like the little guy stealing from the big guy. You really want to see them succeed. They don't ever steal from people who deserve that money. They don't steal from hospitals. They steal from the guy who's got too many casinos. You know, he's not gonna miss it. </blockquote> <p> As a player, we certainly feel it. We’re not only breaking into museums, but also fancy private collections. The game does such a good job laying out the case for bringing the artifacts back that you can focus on the fun of stealing. And there’s a game design theory dimension to heists too. </p> <blockquote> Ben Myers: There's a great book called A Theory of Fun. And what they talk about is that fun is the experience your body has when it's learning. The human brain just loves patterns. And heists are just like patterns that you, as the viewer, are trying to figure out the whole time until it's revealed. And when you see the pieces finally come together, it's incredible.</blockquote> <p> So using the way video games employ patterns helps the gameplay: each heist is a little harder, but fortunately you're a little better at it. <p>But patterns also help the story: each time you learn of yet another stolen artifact from all parts of the continent, you start to realize the bigger pattern. <p> The museums in Relooted are mostly unnamed, relying on subtle or not-so-subtle references to real world institutions. Some, like Hans Sloane and the British Museum, come up by name, along with narratives about looted artifacts, enslavers, or investment in human trafficking companies. You can learn more about Hans Slone and the British Museum on episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, or by playing Relooted. <p> But there is one real-world museum important to the narrative. As you and your crew start amassing the objects, you return them to the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. From here, they are redistributed to their home countries. <p>The Museum of Black Civilizations was the dream of Léopold Senghor, Senegal's first democratically elected president. <blockquote> <p> Ben Myers: the game for a long time was called Senghor’s Rebels because Senghor was the first democratically elected president of Senegal. He was a poet before he went into politics. And so when he became president, he put all this money into the arts in Senegal, but his dream. Was to always have this one museum in Dakar, Senegal, where he could bring culture from across the continent into one place. And he died before he saw what happened. But that is the Museum of Black Civilizations.</blockquote> <p> In Relooted, the game design team recreated the facade of the Museum of Black Civilizations, which at the start of the game is a vast, mostly dark hall. As you advance through the game and bring the objects back to the continent, a plinth lights up containing the artifact that's been returned. This cleverly serves the in-game progress bar. <blockquote> Ben Myers: When I was sort of reading interviews and doing research about it, it seemed to be that the curators were alluding to the fact that the museum had deliberately, largely been left empty because they were waiting for all the artifacts to come back from the West. Ben Myers: Someone did a review recently where they literally posted a video of them visiting it and it was just this empty space. Even on TripAdvisor there are like two-star reviews being like, there wasn't a lot to see. </blockquote> <p> Relooted is a triumph. It's genuinely fun while also being one of the most effective pieces of advocacy for repatriation I've ever encountered. If you spend any time thinking about museums, go play this game. <blockquote> Ben Myers: " Working on the game definitely changed my relationship with seeing objects in museums because there's so much about these objects that isn't like put in the captioning. And I find it deeply unsettling now to go to somewhere like the British Museum because I feel like I'm just surrounded by the sort of scale of looting and lack of information about how this stuff got there. So I, I feel like physically uncomfortable in this space and I can't really last. So, yeah, it was very interesting how that changed my relationship.</blockquote> Relooted is available now on Steam and Xbox. This has been Museum Archipelago.</p> </blockquote> </div>
December 15, 2025
111. Why Software Hasn't Eaten Museums (Yet)
<p>Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last.</p> <p>Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. <a href="https://tilbuci.itch.io/tilbuci" rel="nofollow">TilBuci</a> is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure.</p> <p>In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences.</p> <p>Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software Managana, a previous version of TilBuci is running the projection.</p> <h3>Topics and Notes</h3> <ul> <li>00:00 Intro</li> <li>00:15 The Rise of Software in Museums</li> <li>00:56 Software Eating the World</li> <li>02:19 Why Are Museums Different?</li> <li>03:16 <a href="https://tilbuci.itch.io/tilbuci" rel="nofollow">Lucas Junqueira and TilBuci</a></li> <li>05:09 Challenges and Innovations</li> <li>08:09 The Flash Apocalypse</li> <li>10:12 What's at Stake </li> <li>11:48 <a href="http://jointhemuseum.club/" rel="nofollow">Jurassic Park on Club Archipelago</a></li> <li>13:00 <a href="http://jointhemuseum.club/" rel="nofollow">Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖</a></li> </ul> <div id="clubnew"> <center><h3><a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago">DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️</a></h3></center> <div class="row"> <div class="column right">Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. <p> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago" class="ma-cta-button">Join Club Archipelago</a> <p class="ma-trial-info">Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.</p></div> <div class="column final"> Your Club Archipelago membership includes: <ul class="ma-feature-list"> <li>🎙️<strong>Access to a private podcast</strong> that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.</li> <li>🎟️<strong><i> Archipelago at the Movies</i></strong>, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.</li> <li>✨<strong>A warm feeling</strong> knowing you're helping make this show possible.</li> </ul> </ul></div> </div> <p></div></p> <h3>Transcript</h3> <p>Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.</p></p> <div class="wrap-collabsible"> <input id="collapsible" class="toggle" type="checkbox"> <label for="collapsible" class="lbl-toggle">View Transcript</label> <div class="collapsible-content"> <div class="content-inner"> <div> <p>Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. </p> <p> If you've been to a museum lately, any museum big or small, you've probably noticed ever more software-driven experiences. Interactive touchscreens, projections, buttons, videos are all controlled by software.</p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: I've seen mostly all exhibitions have at least some kind of interaction or some pieces of the exhibition that require some kind of software to enable it. </p> </blockquote> <p>This is Lucas Junqueira, a Brazilian museum professional and software developer.</p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: Okay. My name is Lucas Junqueira. I've been working on this exhibition museum scene for quite some time right now. </p> </blockquote> <p>It's tempting to see the increase of software in museums as another example of software eating the world. This phrase, "software eats the world", was coined by investor Marc Andreessen in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. </p> <p>The idea isn’t that software replaces everything. It’s that software absorbs the value layer of company after company, industry after industry. </p> <p>In the "software eats the world" thesis, traditional music labels only exist to provide software companies (like Apple Music and Spotify) with content. The software, everything from how the app looks on your phone to what song is recommended next, sits higher on the value chain than the music itself. Even the network effects of which app your friends use, matter more than what you listen to. </p> <p>Netflix, Salesforce, and the game Angry Birds are some examples Andreessen mentioned back in that 2011 essay, plus plenty of other companies I barely remember. But the core of the thesis, even if it's not explicitly mentioned, is the zero-marginal cost nature of distributing software. Whatever the up-front cost of developing Angry Birds is, it doesn't actually matter since the company can distribute it to every phone on the planet for zero dollars. Once it exists, it can be copied endlessly, instantly, and globally. Which is exactly what museums can’t do.</p> <p>And this is where museums are different.</p> <p>Museums aren’t infinitely scalable, and they aren’t frictionless. You can't really download an exhibition in the way that you can download a song. You have to show up. There's only one Mona Lisa. </p> <p>And that's why software in museums is (so far at least) immune from software eating the rest of the world.</p> <p>Yes, there's more software in museums than ever, but that software rarely becomes the value layer. </p> <p>Museum software doesn't own the audience relationship, and it doesn't become the product like Spotify was able to do. Instead, it supports the product. As long as museums continue to control distribution, software remains infrastructure: a tool to help museums tell their stories.</p> <p>Lucas and I are both software developers, specializing in building exactly that infrastructure. </p> <p>One of Lucas's early projects was creating software to project images onto the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum, which faces Liberty Square plaza in the Brazilian town of Belo Horizonte. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: We provided them a tool so they can make, a projection. They do have a projection on the front wall of the museum. It's a very big projection, and it is right in front of a square here in my city that is very crowded all the time. </p> <p>So they wanted to use this to show something they are exhibiting right now the museum is funded by a university, so they wanted to show some scientific evolutions. They want to use it like an information tool. They wanted to do that and provided them with the software used to produce the content to show on this big projection.</p> </blockquote> <p>Almost always, the cost of these projects is front-loaded: museums pay Lucas, or me, to create the software that projects the images and everyone is focused on that opening day. Lucas explains that this focus on new exhibitions is related to sponsorship funding. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: We see that,, most of the museums had some requirements when they start a new exhibition, they usually have some kind of budget and some kind of funding to that. And that doesn't really happen when these institutions have to maintain their spaces. They can get some sponsors to new exhibitions, but they don't get so many sponsors when they are just keeping the museum open, right?</p> </blockquote> <p>And this is what happened to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. Long after Lucas finished building the software, and long after the project had successfully finished, the museum wanted to update that projection to show new content. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: And it was these, that, brought me the idea of creating a tool so the people on museum can use it without technical knowledge, because I felt they were needing to create some interactive content, but they needed to do it by themselves.</p> </blockquote> <p>Lucas wanted to make software that acted like infrastructure. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: And I felt this need to create something that the museums and the, institutions can use to both create the big exhibitions, the big interactions for the new exhibitions, but also something that they can use, on by day, day basis.</p> <p>Lucas Junqueira: Because they don't have that sort of technical people or budget to fund these on a day by day basis. Right? And so when I started thinking about creating something that they can used for both things. They can use it when something new is coming and they can hire people to do it. They can hire technical people, they can hire developers to do it, but something that they can install on their computers and with minimal knowledge they can use to solve day by day problems. </p> </blockquote> <p>The result is TilBuci, a piece of software that Lucas developed on his own. It's a tool for helping build the software infrastructure a museum might need. The name TilBuci comes from Lucas's dog. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: His name is Busi He, he keeps company for me. He is always where I am. When I'm working, he's close to me all the time. So when I had to think about that name first I thought, that would be perfect, let's name after him! </p> </blockquote> <p>TilBuci, which you can download for free on any OS platform you want, is an impressive suite: capable of doing anything from slideshows, interactive menus with animation, dialogue systems, survey kiosks, and quiz games. </p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: It started growing slowly with the functions that started growing slowly because of course it's a free software and it's not funded by anyone. Well, it's funded by my own work. Right? So, I started creating like this. So when someone hired me to develop, for example, a kiosk and I had to build a, a in specific function instead of creating it somewhere else, I use it on that case, I create, I use it to create the code and incorporate it on the base software.And so the, the, the basis of, of TilBuci started that. It started growing from the day by day work, my of myself. </p> </blockquote> <p>But it wasn’t without setbacks. Lucas’s early code was written to be distributed on Flash. Flash Player was, for a long time, an easy way to make interactive media work on the web and in museums. It was a browser plugin developed and controlled by Adobe, and it allowed designers to build animations, videos, games, and interactive experiences that ran the same way almost everywhere. If you wanted something dynamic, visual, and relatively easy to deploy, Flash was often the answer. </p> <p>Museums adopted Flash for the same reason everyone else did: it lowered the barrier to making interactive content.</p> <p>But Flash was also a closed system. Museums didn't control it. When Adobe decided to end support in 2020, thousands of interactives simply stopped working -- not because the exhibitions had changed, but because the supporting software wasn't allowed to run.</p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: At that time when we called the apocalypses, our digital apocalypse when we when the found problem of the Flash player. And what in about 2020 was kind of bad because it heavily depended upon the flesh player.</p> </blockquote> <p>I remember the Flash Apocalypse too. That moment exposed something important. Even when software is "just a tool," the kind of tool matters. Especially when museums don’t control it.</p> <p>And that's the problem Lucas was trying to solve in the first place. </p> <p>So Lucas switched course and made sure that his software was made with open source technologies.</p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: I started thinking on ways to bring it back to life with something more open, some more open technologies. And that's when I started studying better the JavaScript and something like that. And then I could convert it, convert what we have done to what we have now.</p> </blockquote> <p>While museums have so far avoided software “eating” them, that doesn’t mean they’re immune forever. It's not hard to imagine a company offering museums free interactive kiosks in exchange for visitor data, or a platform that hosts digital exhibitions and starts competing with the physical visit for attention. The moment a third party controls the interface between a museum and its audience, the museum becomes the content supplier—just like the labels became for Spotify. Tools like TilBuci show a different path forward. Instead of extracting value, they extend the life of museum systems by keeping them editable, local, and owned by the institution, long after us programmers leave. They allow institutions to adapt, update, and respond over time — even when budgets shrink and staff change. And this brings us back to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. That projection opened in 2012. And because of TilBuci, it’s still working today.</p> <blockquote> <p>Lucas Junqueira: In this example,this projection without the tool for them to create themselves, it would be closed some time after we left there or there, or it would just be used to show some static videos and so on. But with the train them to create interactive content gave some life to this projection for a bigger time, bigger time spent than it was, than it could have been without it.</p> </blockquote> <p>This has been Museum Archipelago. </p> <p> They never call it a museum. Jurassic Park has a visitor center, a tour, a gift shop, fossils on display.</p> <p>It's curated, it's interpretive, it's full of didactic signage and high budget audio, visual material. It has a pulse visitor experience that begins with an introduction film, but nobody ever says museum. That's because museums are slow, they're dusty, they're institutions. Jurassic Park wants to be something faster, cleaner, cooler, a theme park, a show a miracle.</p> <p>But Jurassic Park is a museum movie. The dinosaurs are exhibits, living dioramas, engineered to validate a particular vision of science and nature and human knowledge. The tour is scripted. The narrative is highly controlled. That is until it isn't. </p> <p>The latest episode of our Bonus podcast, Club Archipelago is an hour and a half on 1994's Jurassic Park from a museum professional's perspective. It’s a good one. Listen at jointhe museum.club to join the club to support the show.</p> </div>
April 14, 2025
110. Revisiting The ‘Enola Gay Fiasco’ Today
<p>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.</p> <p>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."</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3>Topics and Notes</h3> <ul> <li>00:00 Intro</li> <li>00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s</li> <li>01:07 Gregg Herken</li> <li>02:21 Initial Planning </li> <li>02:40 Martin Harwit</li> <li>03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima </li> <li>04:39 'The Lunchbox'</li> <li>05:32 Initial Exhibit Script </li> <li>06:26 Opposition and Controversy </li> <li>07:15 Revisions and Criticisms </li> <li>10:49 Air Force Association's Demands </li> <li>11:59 Exhibit Cancellation </li> <li>13:37 "Pale Shadow"</li> <li>14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship</li> <li>20:55 <a href="http://jointhemuseum.club/" rel="nofollow">Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖</a></li> </ul> <div id="clubnew"> <center><h3><a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago">DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️</a></h3></center> <div class="row"> <div class="column right">Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. <p> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago" class="ma-cta-button">Join Club Archipelago</a> <p class="ma-trial-info">Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.</p></div> <div class="column final"> Your Club Archipelago membership includes: <ul class="ma-feature-list"> <li>🎙️<strong>Access to a private podcast</strong> that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.</li> <li>🎟️<strong><i> Archipelago at the Movies</i></strong>, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.</li> <li>✨<strong>A warm feeling</strong> knowing you're helping make this show possible.</li> </ul> </ul></div> </div> <p></div></p> <h3>Transcript</h3> <p>Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.</p></p> <div class="wrap-collabsible"> <input id="collapsible" class="toggle" type="checkbox"> <label for="collapsible" class="lbl-toggle">View Transcript</label> <div class="collapsible-content"> <div class="content-inner"> <div> <p>Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. </p> <p>By the late 1980s, the Enola Gay – the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – had been sitting disassembled at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland for decades. What was once a beautiful shiny machine with four powerful engines, just powerful enough with the right banking maneuver to escape the hell it unleashed, was scattered and severed, with disheveled tubes where the wings used to be and the remains of birds nests in the turrets. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: It was shortly after I joined the museum and I went out to the restoration facility that the Smithsonian operates in Garber in Maryland. And they wanted to show me around. And since I was the new chairman of the Department of Space History, they said I could get into the fuselage of the Enola Gay.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is Gregg Herken, retired professor of American Diplomatic History at the University of California, and Chairman of the National Air and Space Museum's Space History Division from 1988 to 2003.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: Hello. My name is Gregg Herken. I'm a retired professor of American Diplomatic History at the University of California.</p> </blockquote> <p>Herken was part of the team planning the exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum that would feature the restored Enola Gay and of course he accepted the invitation and climbed up into the fuselage. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: So I sat in Tibbets' seat, in the pilot seat for a second, and then I sat in the bombardier seat. And off to the left was a panel that had, I think it was five toggle switches. And one of them had the label "bombs." And actually on the day of the Hiroshima mission, it would've said in a little tag underneath that "special."</p> <p>Gregg Herken: But I remember just thinking that I could sit in, I'm sitting in that seat, I could just reach over and flip that switch. And that was the switch that released the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima. And I thought there is bad juju with that. I did not want to touch it.</p> </blockquote> <p>At the other end of that switch was about 80,000 people, civilians of Heroshima. </p> <p>Herken was chosen to be part of the exhibition team by the museum's new director, Martin Harwit.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: I've written about and taught the subject of nuclear history, and that's why I think Martin chose me to begin at last the effort to get the Enola Gay on exhibit.</p> </blockquote> <p>Director Martin Harwit, who was hired in 1987, was a bit of a departure from previous National Air and Space Museum directors who tended to be pilots or astronauts. Harwit was an astrophysicist. Gregg Herken thought that it was a signal that the Smithsonian was interested in not just displaying but also interpreting the artifacts that represent the nation's past.</p> <p>The planned exhibition intended to showcase the restored plane along with multiple perspectives on the first atomic bombings in warfare – including their devastating human toll. Harwit still has his first written notes from when he first arrived at the museum and started thinking about, which show his brainstorm about the historical context of the bombing of Hiroshima in the escalation of bombing in World War II. </p> <p>"This is not an exhibit about the rights and wrongs of war," Harwit wrote in 1987, "about who started what, and who were the bad guys and who the good. It is about the impact and effects of bombing on people and on the strategic outcome of conflicts. Is bombing strategically effective? Are the costs worth the strategic gains? How great is human error?"</p> <p>As part of the early planning process, Gregg Herken visited the Hiroshima Museum in Japan in 1991.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: Yes, Martin asked me to go to Hiroshima. The exhibit was just getting started and really in the planning stages. And we wanted to see if we could get artifacts from the Hiroshima Museum. So I was sent there and I met with the director. And I was frankly a little concerned about how I'd be received, that the idea of shipping artifacts about the atomic bombing to the Smithsonian for an exhibit they didn't really know about. I thought they might be hostile or at least suspicious, but he was very welcoming. He was actually a survivor of the atomic bombing.</p> </blockquote> <p>The director offered to loan the Smithsonian any of the artifacts his museum had in its collection, for as long as the "Enola Gay" remained on display at the National Air and Space Museum.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: I do remember walking around the museum and there was one artifact that really stood out to me and we wanted to include it in the exhibit and we nicknamed it "the lunchbox" and it was just a ceramic tube that had contained rice and peas and it had been taken by a young girl to school as her lunch. And she obviously did not survive the bombing and the tube - you could see that the rice and the peas in it had been carbonized by the heat of the bomb.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: So we were never going to show any terrible pictures of burned bodies. We didn't need to. That's all any adult had to do was to look at this lunchbox, at the carbonized food in the little ceramic tube to realize what had happened to that little girl and what it must have been like to have been on the ground at Hiroshima at that time.</p> </blockquote> <p>Back in the United States the exhibition team continued developing their plans and by early 1994, the National Air and Space Museum had completed the script for the exhibit, now titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War." </p> <p>The team sought input from various stakeholders including veterans' groups and the Air Force Association. Initially, feedback seemed positive.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: The Air Force Association is basically a private lobby based in Washington DC for the Air Force. And we knew – the museum, Martin knew that they might be early critics, so they were brought into the planning of the exhibit as was the Air Force historian, Richard Hallion, and were shown the original exhibit script. And I remember we had a meeting in the director's conference room and everybody seemed to be, "Well, this looks good."</p> </blockquote> <p>But behind the scenes, an opposition was mobilizing.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: And then they all left. And then we found out that the Air Force Association had hired a public relations firm in DC to essentially stop the exhibit going forward, at least as it was conceived. Even though there had been no criticism at the meeting itself.</p> </blockquote> <p>This was the beginning of what would become a full-scale public relations battle over how the Enola Gay should be represented at the National Air and Space Museum. The controversy began to spill into the media, with accusations that the exhibition denigrated American heroism and technological achievement by focusing too much on Japanese suffering.</p> <p>Herken acknowledges that, in hindsight, some of the criticisms had merit, and the museum continued updating the script and the exhibition plans.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: Well, they felt that the exhibit really took the viewpoint of the victims of the bombing. Actually, in retrospect, I think there was a certain element of truth to that. One of the things that would've been in the original exhibit as you walk in from the mall, you would've turned to the right and basically toward the aeronautics section of the museum. And the first thing you would see is a giant photograph of a young child who had a smudged face. So that the first thing you would see is basically one of the victims.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: I think a lot of people that, okay, that this is going to be from the viewpoint of the people who were on the ground and not from the people who were in the plane, in the air. So that was problematic and that was changed and I think properly so.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: Also the original exhibit script had a line, and I think here what the curators were trying, I know what the curators were trying to do was present both sides kind of objectively. And unfortunately, I think the lead label was kind of tone deaf that it said for the Americans it was a war of vengeance because of Pearl Harbor - I'm basically paraphrasing - but for the Japanese, it was a war to preserve their sacred culture. Well, that's not the right way to begin things. And that of course was taken out too. And there was, I think, a reasonable objection to that original label.</p> </blockquote> <p>But there was a more fundamental objection to the planned exhibit that the exhibit team didn't find the evidence for in the historical scholarship: that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved a million American lives.</p> <p>I think about my own extended family members who served in the Pacific in World War II, and who died – fortunately relatively recently – convinced that the use of those atomic bombs saved their lives. The one million American lives was certainly how I was taught in history class in elementary and middle school compared with 80,000 or so at Hiroshima. This was taking a fact, the number of dead from the atomic bombing, and mixing it together with an assertion: how many would have died because of not using the bombing. Particularly since equating the two is a comforting thought that ties into America's sense of itself: "Other countries kill people for no reason. We kill people for good reason."</p> <p>That one million American casualties figure seems to have come from a February 1947 article in Harpers called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: Certainly the million American lives, that the bomb exclusively or decisively ended the war, ignoring the Russian entry into the war, which is a surprise to the Japanese. And there were alternatives including the continued strategic conventional bombing of Japan and the economic blockade of the islands, which was going forward. That there was the reason there was no alternative is because the invasion, the land invasion of the Japanese home islands was imminent. Well, no, it wasn't. It was planned for November and the bomb was dropped in August.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: Would the Japanese have surrendered in the meantime? It's a counterfactual question. It can't be answered because it can't be tested. But there is a mythos about the atomic bombing that continues today.</p> </blockquote> <p>An exhibit that sits in that question is a worthy exhibit. We always have choices. Countries have choices. There's very rarely only two choices. But that's not the exhibit we got.</p> <p>Herken recalls that the Air Force Association required the museum to say the following three things in the "Enola Gay" exhibit, and he and his colleagues were given to understand that these assertions were unequivocal and non-negotiable. They were: (1) The atomic bomb ended the war; (2) It saved one million American lives; and (3) There was no real alternative to its use. </p> <p>He continues, "all three of these claims have been challenged by generations of historians, citing documentary evidence from the time that contradicts or significantly modifies each one."</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: I was actually new to the museum, so I can't say that it was, there's never been this sort of, ultimatum issued by people who were involved in, in the exhibits or might be interested in exhibits. But, um, it was certainly new to me. And, um, and I think, you know, all of, all of those assertions are somewhat problematic and, but that was made sort of pretty clear, I think, to Martin and the curators that the exhibit will not go forward. We will stop this unless these three things are clear in the exhibit scripts.</p> </blockquote> <p>By now, the exhibit script had changed many times and the title was changed again to The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. </p> <p>The Air Force Association and the American Legion continued its demands, including removing artifacts that they knew had evocative and emotional power – artifacts, like the lunchbox, that would help visitors consider the effects of flipping that switch. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: That was well along in the process where there was a lot of opposition from the Air Force Association and actually the American Legion to going ahead with the exhibit as we had, as we had planned it. And at one point I remember, Martin and the curators kept on, trying to deal with the criticism and with the critics.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: And, but that was one place I, I thought that we really needed to make a stand and that we can't have the Air Force Association tell us what we can exhibit and what we can't, what we can say and what we can't. But that's exactly what they wanted to do. And, When Martin agreed to take the lunchbox out of the scheduled exhibit, I knew that that was, you know, that was kind of the end of it.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: I kind of lost all hope at that point.</p> </blockquote> <p>Veteran groups called for the curators who wrote the labels to be fired. The lead curator received anonymous death threats. Eighty-one members of Congress called for Director Harwit's resignation or removal. The museum backed down. For the 50 year anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995, as the New York Times reported, the museum eliminat[ed] all of the 10,000-square-foot display except for the plane's restored fuselage and a small plaque. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: It was a pale shadow of what had originally been planned. I, I forget how many pages the original, the, the original exhibit script was, but it, it was kind of a, would've been, critics referred to as, uh, a book on the walls. Uh, it was, um, there was a lot of stuff in the exhibit and, and the original exhibit, and that was simply taken out.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: The exhibit was really given over to the restoration staff who are, who are really very good at their job and. Um, but there, the exhibit was primarily about the process of the restoration of the aircraft. </p> <p>Gregg Herken: I thought the best comment that was made was by a friend of mine who said that she learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but she did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb.</p> </blockquote> <p>The cancellation of the original exhibit and Harwit's resignation sent shockwaves through the museum world that continued rippling for a long time. When I started my career in museums in 2014, the "Enola Gay Fiasco" was something people would talk about – a cautionary tale. What began as an attempt to present a more complete historical picture of the atomic bombings ended with censorship.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: There was certainly a lot of reticence about doing anything that would be controversial as an exhibit after the Enola Gay. It had that sort of chilling effect. And of course, Martin was removed from his position as director of the museum and replaced by a retired Marine Corps general. Ultimately actually by, I think, by two military officers who were subsequent directors of the museum.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: So there was a censorship that was even, I think, self-imposed on doing anything at the museum that would be controversial. And instead the emphasis was really changed to, well, let's focus on the collection and not so much think about doing new exhibits. I think that's probably changed, but it's been a long time since the Enola Gay exhibit.</p> </blockquote> <p>It has been a long time, but the censorship seems more pressing than ever. </p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: I retired from the museums quite some time ago. I'm still in touch with some of the curators I worked with. But obviously the mood at the Smithsonian is not good now under the current administration and the edicts and the executive orders that are coming out of the administration.</p> </blockquote> <p>I wrote to Martin Harwit in February of 2018 – yes, I've been working on this episode for years – and he was kind enough to write back, saying he really had no more to say on the matter that wasn't already in his book, An Exhibit Denied.</p> <p>He then ended his email with this paragraph, "The main reason I'd even be willing to talk with you now, is that the actual use of atomic bombs is once again being seriously considered by a President of the United States. I believe that this would be a terrible mistake: Better than most people still alive today, I know what these weapons of mass destruction involve. As a young physicist drafted into military service, back in 1956, I participated in atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok and Bikini. The awful destruction wreaked by these weapons is unforgettably etched in my mind."</p> <p>I had to look up what was going on in early 2018 when I sent that email. Wikipedia summarizes it this way: "U.S. President Donald Trump responds to Kim Jong-un's claim of having North Korea's nuclear missile launch button on his desk, boasting that the size of the nuclear missile launch button on his own desk is larger and more powerful than Kim's.</p> <p>That feels a lot like a focus on the button itself, and not the consequences of that button.</p> <p>A few weeks ago, again president Donald Trump issued an executive order called RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY.</p> <p>NPR NEWS: [JUANA SUMMERS] The Trump administration continues to move swiftly to eliminate what President Trump calls anti-American ideology from America's cultural institutions. Yesterday, the latest executive order targeted the Smithsonian and the memorials and monuments overseen by the Department of the Interior</p> <p>[ELIZABETH BLAIR] The order is called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It's essentially calling for an overhaul of the Smithsonian and an evaluation of federal monuments. The Smithsonian is a vast complex that includes the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Cooper Hewitt in New York and several other museums and research centers. The executive order claims that the Smithsonian has, quote, "come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology," and that it promotes narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.</p> <p>It makes sense that this censorship battle will continue to focus on museums. Museums use space, artifacts, sounds, and visuals to create powerful, lasting impressions. They're one of the few public spaces where we collectively encounter and process our shared history. The discomfort we feel when confronted with narratives that challenge our national self-image is precisely what makes museums so valuable. Walking into a room in the nation's capital and seeing evidence that contradicts the story you've been told – or the story you deeply believe – about American exceptionalism or heroism can be jarring.</p> <blockquote> <p>[From Public History Focus Interview](https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/phw-video/20772-2/) Gregg Herken: When you see the Enola Gay upfront, it is a powerful symbol. And it shows just the amount of effort and energy and money and resources and intelligence that went into the business of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: So I think that there is an emotive quality to seeing the actual object and that that cannot be conveyed by social media. And the way, what I would compare it to is like the Vietnam Memorial. If you've seen pictures of the Vietnam Memorial, you know, okay, that's, it's this granite wall, all these names on it. But it really is quite evocative to go there and to see. And because I was at the Air and Space Museum, I've walked down to the Lincoln Memorial in the Vietnam Monument at lunchtime, oftentimes. And to see the people there who were scratching the, basically, reproducing the names on the, on the memorial and leaving tributes and tennis shoes, flowers, above the beer was oftentimes the favorite beer of the person who had been killed in the war and was known by the person putting it there.</p> <p>Gregg Herken: That's a powerful experience and something that really can't be conveyed by photographs or videos or things of that sort.</p> </blockquote> <p>The fact that "The Last Act" never made it in front of visitors has created its own, much smaller counterfactual than what would have happened if the bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima. We won't ever know what the world would be like if this exhibit had opened as planned, if the human consequences of the decision were displayed next to the plane.</p> <p>This type of censorship doesn't just symbolize our collective eagerness to look away from uncomfortable questions, it sets the stage, it lays the groundwork for more, bigger bullshit justifications. </p> <p>The power of an interest group or the president to dictate the conclusions of an exhibit, backed up by effective media furry, has leveled up since the Enola Gay fiasco in 1994.</p> <p>So when you walk into a museum, particularly one displaying weapons of war or tools of national power, ask yourself: what's been deliberately left out of this story? Look for the child's lunchbox, and ask why someone thought it was better or more patriotic to hide it from you.</p> <blockquote> <p>Gregg Herken: Yeah, well, I think it should say that American history is complex. And I agree certainly with Martin's assessment in his book, that the American people lost a chance to learn something interesting and important about the decision to drop the bomb. </p> </blockquote> <p>This has been Museum Archipelago.</p> </div>
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