Real history is messy, untidy, unruly. History is conflict, genius, ignorance, stupidity, arrogance. History is filled with human and social dimensions, the meanings of which, and the extent of which, always seems to be available to new findings. If history is the known, it is also the unknown and the not known yet. History, no matter what direction it takes or dimension it assumes, is the subject of museums.
Theme parks are more selective.
In the theme park, history is tidy, pigeonholed and gift-wrapped. In this regard it is therefore closer in many ways to what we call legend and myth. Disneyland fuses the reality of a conglomerate of ethnicities and creates a national universal non-ethnicity that erases or irons over all inherited differences. In Disneyland everyone speaks English. But more, the theme park, by casting American legends into story-bites and emblematic events and welding these to the lingua franca of trademark, emblem, logogram and corporate symbology, has created a metaphor by which the corporate mark is equated with the symbols of national pride.