Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post wrote about the efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite American history. Trump wants “patriotic history,” in which evil things never happened and non-white people and women were seldom noticed. In other words, he wants to control historical memory, sanitize it, and restore history as it was taught when he was in school about 65 years ago (1960), before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other actions that changed what historians know and teach.
Dvorak writes:
A section of Arlington National Cemetery’s website highlighting African American military heroes is gone.
Maj. Lisa Jaster was the first woman to graduate from Army Ranger school. But that fact has been scrubbed from the U.S. Army Reserve [usar.army.mil] and Department of Defense websites. [search.usa.gov]
The participation of transgender and queer protesters during the LGBTQ+ uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn was deleted from the National Park Service’s website [nps.gov] about the federal monument.
And the Smithsonian museum in Washington, which attracts millions of visitors who enter free each year, will be instructed by Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology.”
In a series of executive orders, President Donald Trump is reshaping the way America’s history is presented in places that people around the world visit.
In one order, he declared that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “undermine our national unity,” and more pointedly, that highlighting the country’s most difficult chapters diminishes pride in America and produces “a sense of national shame.”
The president’s orders have left historians scrambling to collect and preserve aspects of the public record, as stories of Black, Brown, female or LGBTQ+ Americans are blanched from some public spaces. In some cases, the historical mentions initially removed have been replaced, but are more difficult to find online.
That rationale has galvanized historians to rebuke the idea that glossing over the nation’s traumas — instead of grappling with them — will foster pride, rather than shame.
Focusing on the shame, they say, misses a key point: Contending with the uglier parts of U.S. history is necessary for an honest and inclusive telling of the American story. Americans can feel pride in the nation’s accomplishments while acknowledging that some of the shameful actions in the past reverberate today.
“The past has no duty to our feelings,” said Chandra Manning, a history professor at Georgetown University.
“History does not exist to sing us lullabies or shower us with accolades. The past has no obligations to us at all,” Manning said. “We, however, do have an obligation to the past, and that is to strive to understand it in all its complexity, as experienced by all who lived through it, not just a select few.”
That is not to say that the uncomfortable weight of difficult truths isn’t a valid emotion.
Postwar Germans were so crushed by the burden of their people’s past, from the horrors of the Nazi regime to the protection of war criminals in the decades after the war, that they have a lengthy word for processing it: vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means the “work of coping with the past.” It has informed huge swaths of German literature and film and has shaped the physical way European cities create memorials and museums.
America’s version of vergangenheitsbewältigung can be found across the cultural landscape. From films to books to classrooms and museums, Americans are learning more details about slavery in the South, the way racism has affected everything from baseball to health care, and how sexism shaped the military.
Trump, however, looks at the U.S. version of vergangenheitsbewältigung differently.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” said the executive order targeting museums, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
That is what “fosters a sense of national shame,” he says in his order.
Historians take exception to that. “I would argue that it’s actually weird to feel shame about what people in the past did,” Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen said.
“As I like to tell my students, ‘I’m not talking about you. We will not use ‘we’ when we refer to Americans in the past, because it wasn’t us and we don’t have to feel responsible for their actions. You can divest yourself of this feeling,’” she said.
Germans also have a phrase for enabling a critical look at their nation’s past: die Gnade der spät-geborenen, “the grace of being born too late” to be held responsible for the horror of the Nazi years.
Benton-Cohen said she honed her approach to this during her first teaching job in the Deep South in 2003, when she emphasized the generational gap between her students and the history they were studying.
“They could speak freely of the past — even the recent past, like the 1950s and 1960s, because they weren’t there,” she said. “They were free to make their own conclusions. It was exciting, and it worked. Many told me it was the first time they had learned the history of the 1960s because their high schools — both public and private — had skipped it to avoid controversy. We did fine.”
Trump hasn’t limited his attempt to control how history is presented in museums or memorials. Among the first executive orders he issued was “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Another one sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in the nation’s workplaces, classrooms and museums. His version of American history tracks with how it was taught decades ago, before academics began bringing more diverse voices and viewpoints into their scholarship.
Maurice Jackson, a history professor at Georgetown University who specializes in jazz and Black history, said Black Americans have fought hard to tell their full story.
Black history was first published as “The Journal of Negro History” in 1916, in a townhouse in Washington when academic Carter G. Woodson began searching for the full story of his roots. A decade later, he introduced “Negro History Week” to schools across the United States, a history lesson that was widely cheered by White teachers and students alongside Black Americans who finally felt seen.
“Black history is America’s history,” Jackson said. And leaving the specifics of the Black experience out because it makes some people ashamed gives an incomplete picture of our nation, he said.
After Trump issued his executive orders, federal workers scrambled to interpret and obey them, which in some cases led to historical milestones being removed, or covered up and then replaced.
Federal workers removed a commemoration of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Pentagon website, then restored it. They taped butcher paper over the National Cryptologic Museum’s display honoring women and people of color, then uncovered the display.
Mentions of Harriet Tubman in a National Park Service display about the Underground Railroad were removed, then put back. The story of legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson’s military career was deleted from the Department of Defense website, then restored several days later.
Women known as WASPs risked their lives in military service — training and test pilots during World War II for a nation that didn’t allow them to open a bank account — is no longer a prominent part of the Pentagon’s digital story.
George Washington University historian Angela Zimmerman calls all the activity. which happened with a few keystrokes and in a matter of days, the digital equivalent of “Nazi book burnings.”
In response, historians — some professional, some amateur — are scrambling to preserve information before it is erased and forgotten.
The Organization of American Historians created the Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative, which is a callout for content that is in danger of being obliterated
This joins the decades-long work of preserving information by the Internet Archive, a California nonprofit started in 1996 that also runs the Wayback Machine, which stores digital records.
Craig Campbell, a digital map specialist in Seattle, replicated and stored the U.S. Geological Service’s entire historical catalogue. His work was crowdfunded by supporters.
“Historical maps are critical for a huge range of industries ranging from environmental science, conservation, real estate, urban planning, and even oil and gas exploration,” said Campbell, whose mapping company is called Pastmaps. “Losing access to the data and these maps not only destroys our ability to access and learn from history, but limits our ability to build upon it in so many ways as a country.”
After astronomer Rose Ferreira’s profile was scrubbed from, then returned, to NASA’s website, she posted about it on social media. In response, an online reader created a blog, Women in STEM, to preserve stories such as Ferreira’s.
“Programs that memorialize painful truths help ensure past wrongs are never revived to harm again,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nevada), said on X, noting that presidents are elected to “run our government — not rewrite our history.”
Authoritarian leaders have long made the whitewashing of history a tool in their regimes. Joseph Stalin expunged rivals from historic photographs. Adolf Hitler purged museums of modernist art and works created by Jewish artists, which he labeled “degenerate.” Museums in Mao Zedong’s China glorified his ideology.
While this may be unfamiliar to Americans, Georgetown University history professor Adam Rothman says that in the scope of human history, “these are precedented times.”
It’s not yet clear what the real-world effect of Trump’s Smithsonian order will be or exactly how it will be carried out. Who will determine what exhibits cause shame and need to be removed? What will the criteria be? Will exhibits that discuss slavery, for instance, be eliminated or altered?
“Our nation is an ongoing experiment,” says Manning, the Georgetown history professor, who has written books about the Civil War. “And what helps us do that now in 2024 compared to 1776 is that we do have a shared past.
“Every single human culture depends upon, grows out of, and is shaped by its past,” she said. “It is the past that has shaped all of us, it is our past that contains the bonds that can really hold us together.”
It’s what makes the study — and threat to — American history unique among nations. Benton-Cohen said that is what she sees happen with her students.
“The American striving to realize the democratic faith and all the difficulties it entailed and challenges overcome should inspire pride, not shame,” she said. “If you feel shame, as the kids would say, that’s a ‘you’ problem. That’s why I still fly the flag at my house; I’m not afraid of the American past, I’m alive with the possibilities — of finding common cause, of fighting for equality, of appreciating our shared humanity, of upholding our freedoms.”
