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Mattias Eken

Dr Mattias Eken is a Quality Assurance Officer and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Richmond, the American International University of London. His areas of expertise include 20th century US political and cultural history, the history of nuclear weapons, and the US culture wars. He is currently researching the development of the term weapons of mass destruction. Dr Eken received his PhD in Modern History from the University of St Andrews in 2019. He also holds an MA in War Studies from Kings’ College London (2014) and a BA in History from the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David (2011).

Book Review: The Age of Hiroshima edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry

The essays chosen for The Age of Hiroshima are an attempt by its editors to, in their words, ‘unsettle’ the legacy and understanding of the bombing of Hiroshima, an act that ushered in the nuclear age. (2) This collection explores the nuclear age from a global perspective, rather than simply through the viewpoint of the Cold War.


The Exhibit That Bombed: The Enola Gay Controversy and Contested Memory

In March 1994, a heated argument erupted over a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The exhibit, scheduled to open in the spring of 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, would focus on the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The exhibit generated an outcry amongst veterans, members of Congress, and others who felt that it depicted the Japanese as victims in World War II and questioned the morality behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb. After five rewrites and nearly a year of intense argument between the museum, veteran organisations, and Congress, the exhibit was cancelled and replaced with a drastically scaled down and less graphic exhibit. Unlike other instances […]