Who Owns American History?

Who Owns American History? Who Owns American History? Under the second Trump administration, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory? Every nation tells itself a story about where it came from. Arguably, the question that matters more than any particular facts is who gets to tell it. For the past year and a half, Donald Trump’s second administration has been answering that question with unusual bluntness: The president does. Not the thousands of people across the country who have devoted their lives to actually studying, documenting, and understanding the American past. Not the professional societies of historians and archivists and their peer-review panels. Not the museum curators and educators who have spent over sixty years broadening narratives of American history to encompass the diverse multitudes who actually made it. This bid to take over American history presents itself as upholding principles of “truth and sanity” that the Trump administration otherwise often treats as optional. His executive order on March 27, 2025, describes “a concerted and widespread effort” over the last decade to replace “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” It directs federal agencies to review historical interpretations at museums, monuments, parks, and historic sites to ensure they reflect the administration’s preferred narrative of the country’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” The White House claims to be returning neutrality, and thus sanity, to American history. In reality, however, such orders command a state-directed interpretation of the nation’s past, seeking to impose unquestionable dogmas on the rest of us. This fight over who gets to tell the national narrative, as well as how it is told, showcases the cultural ambitions of the expanding executive power in our current moment. It also revives a much older fight over the American past, with enormous stakes for American democracy. Ultimately, it is a fight over whether American history belongs to the many or to the few. To understand what is being lost, it helps to remember what has been achieved over the past two or three generations in history professionals’ understanding of U.S. history. Through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this history was largely a chronicle of statesmen, generals, and captains of industry—great white men doing great things, even divinely destined things—strung together into a story of seemingly uncontestable American exceptionalism. That began to change in the 1960s, when civil rights activists, labor organizers, Indigenous communities, feminists, environmentalists, and a New Left inspired by these social movements pushed historians to ask different questions. What was it like to be enslaved? To organize a union? To be pushed off tribal land? To fight for the vote? To survive the closet? “History from below,” as it came to be called, did not dismiss or discard the founders or presidents. But it did insist that the country’s history has also been composed of, and driven by, ordinary Americans—and should belong to them. That transformation produced what history professionals as well as curious and engaged Americans of all sorts now recognize as the pillars of a serious historical education: Black history, women’s history, Indigenous history, labor history, LGBTQ+ history, environmental history, and histories of immigration, civil rights, disability, and everyday life. It was and is a professional enterprise, grounded in archives, evidence, analytical methods, and peer review, and, like so many other knowledge-based professions, it offered credentialing and careers for many who carry out its work. At the same time, it dispersed authority for history-telling broadly, not just across academic institutions and K–12 classrooms but throughout those museums, parks, archives, and historical sites where history professionals went to work. At once pluralistic and professional, the decentralized historical enterprise that has taken shape over the last half-century largely came to share a commitment to democratizing history. It did so not by replacing one mythological grand narrative with another, so much as by widening the range of questions, voices, and sources through which the past can be understood. Despite the political commitments that steered many history professionals toward this project, its dispersion across so many different institutions, sites, and types of history-telling produced a pluralistic breadth that defies easy political categorizations, contrary to how the Trump administration has caricatured it. Its overall drift has even stirred significant debate among historians themselves—worries, for instance, that it has splintered into tales of particular groups or themes, losing track of overarching power structures and trajectories. Over the past couple of decades, even as academic history departments have faced pressures from downsizing, adjunctification, and declining enrollments, history professionals have nevertheless continued to write and teach syntheses of U.S. history, but without conveying any single authoritative voice across our nation’s public sphere. That’s in part because U.S. history as a professional enterprise is so multivocal, but also because that sphere itself has become so deeply fragmented, split into politically defined bubbles. Tellingly, the single most prominent subject of criticism for the Trump administration, the 1619 Project, originated at the New York Times Magazine, outside of history professional circles. Not surprisingly, it garnered both support and criticism from prominent historians. Yet these institutions making more informed, vetted, and honest historical inquiry possible are what the current administration has targeted, along with those topics and historical realities it deems “woke.” A recent report from the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) of the Organization of American Historians surveys and catalogs the moves and infrastructure through which the current administration has carried out its assault on history. The campaign rests on three strategies: “the censorship and erasure of histories disfavored by the White House, the weakening of institutions that sustain historical work, and the imposition of a narrowly defined, state-directed ‘patriotic’ narrative.” Together, these are components of a coordinated effort to reshape how Americans know and encounter their own past. The move to censure U.S. historians follows through on the White House’s dogma that the democratization of American history over the past half-century has corrupted “real” objective knowledge. Historical scrutiny of race, gender, climate change, and inequality is treated as an ideological distortion, rather than the legitimate product of decades of rigorous scholarship. Executive orders have mandated reviews of exhibits and interpretation throughout the Smithsonian Institution and across the National Park Service. As a result, museums have been accused of “anti-American ideology” and instructed to avoid interpretations that “disparage Americans.” Since Trump took office, more than 1,000 signs at national parks have been flagged for review or removal. The administration has also undermined both governmental and non-government institutions that support the historical enterprise. Historical record-keeping has come under attack, and not just through this administration’s resistance to preserving many of its own records. The Archivist of the United States, who leads the institution responsible for preserving the record of the federal government, was dismissed without cause, and staffing at the National Archives as well as other history-supporting agencies from the Department of Education to the National Park Service has fallen. Exemplifying the administration’s retreat from a public-facing historical record, the Historical Advisory Committee overseeing the declassification of foreign relations records was disbanded, and the processing of records requests under the Freedom of Information Act dropped around 52 percent. Some of this destruction stems from the administration’s blunt-force shredding of the federal workforce under DOGE. Later moves, from budget cuts to the closure of regional branches of the National Archives, point to a more studied and systematic resolve: to reduce the historical record as well as the public’s access to it. The consequences could be truly far-reaching, reducing what we and later generations can know about this presidency and perhaps those going forward. Agencies and programs administering grants for historical work beyond the executive branch, from research to education to historical preservation, have been uniformly hard hit. Approximately 1,400 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that support archives, documentaries, museums, preservation projects, and local history initiatives were terminated. While a federal court ordered restoration of these grants months later, the disruption and slow pace of reinstatement may still extinguish many of these projects. Other agencies’ funding programs have now both shrunk and veered away from peer review, awarding millions to politically favored institutions and to Trump’s own pet architectural projects. As for the history pushed by this administration as “patriotic,” from the White House website to “Freedom 250,” Trump has contracted out two private institutions closely affiliated with the conservative movement. Hillsdale College, a small but well-endowed Christian institution in Michigan, co-produced a “Story of America” video series, and PragerU, a conservative media outlet that has developed free educational content to replace the allegedly “left-wing ideology,” has helped sponsor mobile “Freedom Trucks” touring museums across the country. Other official histories, such as the one found in the White House’s “Presidential Walk of Fame,” include interjections of Trumpian campaign rhetoric, including a sign for Bill Clinton that mentions how his “wife, Hillary, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!” Among the standards for history imposed by this administration is that it centers on “American exceptionalism,” echoing older meanings akin to “Manifest Destiny”—the idea that the successes of the experiment of the United States showed that it was destined, even divinely so, to spread its form of government, economy, and white supremacy across North America and the world. The Trumpian version simply asserts superlatives. As the president recently put it, our nation has “the largest economy,” “the strongest military,” “the most powerful technology,” “the greatest culture,” and “the greatest people on Earth.” This is an exceptionalism that runs largely on rhetorical fumes, given the depths of this administration’s corruption as well as its erratic performance on the world stage. There are inspiring stories to tell about the founding era, the Constitution, and the expansion of liberty over time. Serious history professionals write and teach such stories every day. Many of their historical narratives are patriotic in how seriously they take our country’s ideals—enough to pose questions about whether and when they have been realized across our nation’s past. What sets the administration’s prescriptions for history apart is that they are both sanitized and compulsory. They are backed by the power to control information and record-keeping, withhold funding, disband expert oversight bodies, and fire the people who disagree. Seen together, these actions constitute a single project of moving the authority to decide what counts as history out of the hands of history professionals and into those of the president and his political appointees. As the HARPP report observes, that entails a radical departure from the “decentralized and pluralistic” historical culture developed over the past half-century, which not coincidentally also affirmed the importance of ordinary and even long-marginalized people to U.S. history. A pluralistic historical culture is one in which a Smithsonian exhibit, a tribal museum, a battlefield park, a labor archive, or an internment site can each illuminate different dimensions of the American experience. This disperses authority, while making space for competing interpretations to be tested against evidence, rather than being captured by political ideology and executive power. Precisely because it frustrates those who long for a single cohesive narrative of American history, this pluralism serves as a bulwark for a more democratic national culture. Given the alternative models for history-telling now before us, the fight over history has become a fight over democracy. A functioning democracy, the HARPP report asserts, depends upon “the availability and accessibility of reliable records, the independence of rigorous scholarly inquiry, and the ability of citizens to engage critically and honestly with the past.” In the hands of a president who openly admires authoritarian strongmen, historical denialism and revisionism cease to be merely academic concerns. They become threats to public accountability itself. This assault on so many fundamentals of history is not going unanswered. Lawsuits have already restored some NEH grants, courts have ordered exhibits reinstated, and professional associations and grassroots groups alike have organized, testified, and documented what is happening. State and local organizations have planned their own commemorations of the country’s anniversary independent of the White House’s Freedom 250 programming. Historians continue to research, write, publish, and curate exhibits that tell the full story of the United States even amid mounting political and financial pressure. Nonetheless, the underlying question remains unresolved: Who deserves to be trusted with the country’s memory? Those in this administration that say the president still has that authority for the next two and a half years. The White House’s report released this July, “Saving America’s Story,” which asserts executive authority to correct the “ideological capture” of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, is just the most recent attempt. Among the priorities ahead, we need to prepare for a future presidential administration that is genuinely interested in historical integrity, democratic modes of history, and our nation’s historical record. Provided the opportunity arises, rehiring archivists, restaffing agencies, and reinstalling interpretive exhibits will certainly be necessary, but we have to do more than just restore the status quo. We will need to strengthen and fully fund the nation’s archival foundations, and to undertake a serious revision of the Federal Records Act that will strengthen its terms and oversight, especially for digital documents and messaging. We also need to rethink the relationship between the federal government and the history professions, to innovate new models of collaboration that can become more fruitful as well as more sustainable. Moreover, we need to find ways of forestalling a vicious cycle that now may already be at work, in which the erosion of public investment in history leads to an erosion of collective trust in the history being told. But the more difficult challenge we face is how to rebuild the institutions, professional expertise, and intellectual infrastructure that make democratic historical practice possible. Such a reconstruction must address the economic hollowing out of the historical professions themselves. A nation that values history must ensure that historical expertise does not just belong to a shrinking few; that it is broadly shared and maximally public. Rebuilding this historical capacity will require better funding of archives, museums, and other spaces, all the way down to where local groups’ and communities’ histories are preserved and presented. The true measure of a post-Trump reconstruction will be a stronger historical infrastructure writ large, one strong enough to ensure that no future administration can so easily undermine our nation’s relationship with its own past. Beth English is a historian of labor and gender history and Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. Christopher Sellers is a historian of environmental history and capitalism and Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University.