"As the Trump administration censors history on parks and public lands — a move out of the autocrats’ playbook — people have six ways to honor and defend our shared history."
"As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, there will be no shortage of speeches about freedom, patriotism, and the genius of the American experiment. The principles established at our nation’s founding — free and fair elections, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and the right to organize — have enabled generations of Americans to demand and secure cleaner air, safer water, and a healthier environment. But one of the clearest tests of whether we believe in that experiment is whether we will keep learning from our history or attempt to hide it.
The rewriting of history is happening in the parks and historic sites our children visit on field trips and families explore on vacations. Those signs and exhibits shape our civic identity and collective memory — which is why efforts to rewrite or erase what Americans see and learn in these places should alarm people across the political spectrum.
Earlier this year the National Park Service removed panels at George Washington’s Philadelphia home that named and told the stories of the people enslaved there.
In a scathing opinion invoking the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, a federal judge ordered those panels restored (a ruling overruled by an appeals court June 18). But the effort to sanitize the historical record — our shared understanding of what America is, was, and hopes to become — extends far beyond a single site."
