The Smithsonian Curates America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Abstract

This chapter explores the evolution of the Smithsonian museums, including failed attempts to establish a national war museum, before focusing on one exhibition at its National Museum of American History. The Price of Freedom: Americans at War is a permanent display of objects related to every war Americans fought from colonial times to the 2003 war in Iraq. At issue is how that exhibition depicts the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Ten years before Price of Freedom opened, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition on the American bombing of Hiroshima that collapsed from controversy over whose war and which victims should be shown. The Price of Freedom cautiously focuses only on the American side of each war. The Vietnam rooms offer impressive American technologies while rooms dedicated to the American war in Iraq are remarkably absent of objects and seem barely curated.