| Abstract | Immediately after the Cold War came to a surprisingly quiet end, many conservatives attempted to cement the Cold War as a "Good war" in the minds of the American public and proclaim a specific place for it in American collective memory.As a result, historical sites around the United States with the job of explaining the Cold War often apologize for actions of a nation that, at least in the conservative view, "Won" the Cold War.I] The conservative argument portrays the history of the 20th century as a drama in two acts, with the United States battling totalitarianism in the early Cold War and Ronald Reagan defeating the Soviet Union to end the Cold War.Through these visits, Wiener grapples with the relationship between history and memory, testing his thesis to reveal how conservative and realist arguments have shaped the memorialization of America's Cold War past.Iii] Another curious example is Fulton, Missouri, the site where in 1946 Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain." That speech, perhaps more than any other moment in the early Cold War, contributed to linking the "Good War" with the burgeoning Cold War.The Churchill Memorial in Missouri does not highlight the one reference that so clearly linked the war on fascism to the war on communism.Vi] These four examples, out of the twenty-one Cold War sites that Weiner visited, document the failure of the conservative Cold War framework: "The conservative's museums weren't built, their monuments have been…
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