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When Nations Remember: Hiroshima in the American Consciousness and Conscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Alan G. Gross
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Extract

Routinely represented by the mushroom cloud that arose from the city immediately subsequent to the atomic attack, Hiroshima has a central place in America's collective memory; it is, to borrow historian Pierre Nora's pregnant phrase, an American lieu de mémoire. In the American psyche, Hiroshima is not a place; it is an event of a special kind, one that is “immediately invested with symbolic significance” (Nora, 18). Even as the attack unfolded, even as the bomb left the bomb-bay doors, Hiroshima was “being commemorated in advance,” an event that was transformed, as it occurred, into a denning moment in national identity (18). Did the mushroom cloud mark an American triumph, the last act in the drama of World War II, or did it mask the inception of a new era for which America must take prime responsibility, an era of nuclear terror?

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 467 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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