I went through grade school, high school, college and law school without ever hearing about the Tulsa riots or the Trail of Tears, among other negative episodes. My experience was not unique. It is only in the last couple of decades that a number of previously suppressed episodes showing the underside of our nation’s history have finally emerged into the public consciousness.
It isn’t a coincidence that Americans are only recently hearing about historical events involving women and people of color. The full history of women and Black and Brown Americans is finally emerging thanks to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement–movements that fostered the equal rights and recognition that MAGA despises as “woke.”
As the culture has changed, the backlash has become more ferocious. The Trump administration is trying to root out DEI–characterizing efforts to combat historic exclusion as “anti-White,” and mounting assaults on historic displays at museums and national parks. Meanwhile, Red states like Florida are re-writing curricula to ensure that their students will graduate with the same ignorance of history that I experienced.
The Washington Post recently reported on one aspect of the administration’s efforts. An internal government database disclosed “the vast scope of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to revise or remove information on African American history, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.” Park employees are under orders to eliminate displays that might “disparage” America, and a growing number of those displays are being “evaluated” to ensure that they are properly positive.
At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, the Trump administration is “reviewing” the exhibit on the teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men— though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”
At the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, the staff has asked federal officials “to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.'”
These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.
The submissions are a troubling indication of the scope of Trump’s effort to recast the history of the country–and to revise how–if at all– our national parks address such subjects as America’s history of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution.
The database became public when a group that described itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted it to two public websites, explaining that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”
You will not be surprised to learn that the Department failed to respond to reporters’ questions about the status of the reviews, the process for evaluation, or about the specific examples in the database.
One obvious effect of the administration’s new rules has been confusion.
Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??”
Others wanted to know whether books or displays about slavery and the black experience, or about Lincoln’s assassination–events that may or may not “disparage” historical figures, but that do cover “dark periods in American history”– are acceptable. What about displays that acknowledge Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings?
As the report notes, many–if not most– National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work because they were passionate about telling true stories about history and science. A former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park was quoted as saying “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”
Among the MAGA revisionists who have applauded Trump’s effort to redact inconvenient history is Indiana’s embarrassing White Christian nationalist Senator Jim Banks, who has written to officials at Interior and the Park Service over his concerns about “woke” projects that “cast America’s founding and history in a negative light.”
Actually, it’s people like Trump and Banks–people who want to rewrite history– who cast America in a negative light.
Once again we see the real impetus behind Project 2025. MAGA is just the cult that follows these fetid guidelines. Heck J.D. Vance helped write it and Russell Voght is being paid by taxpayers to help destroy our history and lessons learned.
Many on this blog have accurately pointed out that this attack on our REAL history is right out of the NAZI playbook. In 1935-36 Sinclair Lewis published “It Can’t Happen Here.” He was wrong.
“It isn’t a coincidence that Americans are only recently hearing about historical events involving women and people of color. The full history of women and Black and Brown Americans is finally emerging thanks to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement–movements that fostered the equal rights and recognition that MAGA despises as “woke.”
And the information has been taken up as ammunition for Trump and MAGAs anti-DEI, anti “woke” and the proposed SAVE act to prevent married women from voting in upcoming elections. The information is being used against us and strengthening Trump’s full immunity terrorism on our own streets and globally. The USE of information is as vital as the release of information and into whose hands it is used to their advantage.
The Republican party, now known as Trump’s MAGA movement, has latched onto the WWII oft repeated “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” and it is working for them. Democrats are lagging behind bringing to my mind that they are following Oscar Wilde’s quote, “Moderation in everything, including moderation.” We are falling behind on all counts; are our enemies and allies alike still laughing at Trump’s foolish blathering or are they gearing up for the WWIII we believed the creation of nuclear weapons had scared us away from but Trump is leading us to?
The United States government tracked down the Japanese Admiral of the submarine which had torpedoed the U.S.S. Indianapolis to use his testimony against Capt. McVey to Court Marshal him for “allowing the ship to be torpedoed”. Trump is using information gained from secret talks with his former supporters Putin and Kim Jong Un to continue his war on Iran and now Putin is using Trump’s shared information with Iran against us. Is Cuba of any use to Trump other than another distraction from Epstein Files and now his Iran war?
The warning of Iran and/or their allies attacking the United States directly has been outed by the media and denied by the lying Trump administration. We ignored warning before the World Trade Center attacks. IS ANYONE WRITING ALL OF THIS DOWN?
I didn’t follow the Hitler Youth Project, but don’t look now. I wrote the ACLU and Common Cause because they had better stop TPUSA’s “Club America” in our high schools before it’s too late. After my experience with Texas, Indiana is doing the exact same thing. Braun has declined documents. INDOE has declined documents. Still pending from Beckwith and Rokita. The picture of the pearly white high school kids fits the target market. “Fighting wokeism” from teachers and their students with the “woke mind virus” is what they’re being taught is a “good patriot.” It’s also about white Christian Nationalism and peddles campaign drives for MAGA candidates.
https://muncievoice.com/38252/club-america-tpusa-program-governor-braun-supports/
As Sheila pointed out, they are redefining what being a “Patriot” means. What’s worse is that the Governors are threatening teachers or administrators with negative consequences should they interfere with this after-school club, which is so righteous and good that they can’t share any of the Club’s material.
If it’s so wonderful, why are they keeping it from parents? If they are using public money, the whole program should be disallowed until IDOE has reviewed it and made recommendations to Congress.
And this isn’t the dark side of what TPUSA and their Zionist donors are really doing with these programs. It’s ALL about data harvesting. Once they get that, they’ll own your mind.
The right to Freedom of Speech is its own achilles heel demanding constant truth monitoring, open debate and rebuttal when scoundrels use that Right to spread lies and twisted facts to subvert the will of the people. We are ALL called upon to speak truth to power. No one is exempt, not even congressmen and senators.
I just received a News Brief on my cell phone that some white South Africans are returning home because “…they don’t want to live in a country like this…” Who will pay for this ass-backward form of “self-deporting” of immigrants Trump and Musk brought here for their safety? And how will it be explained or will it be covered up? Another Trump “Never before in the history of the United States of America…” chapter for the history books.
“Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it. Those who do not want history taught want to repeat it.”
I was born and raised 40 miles north of Tulsa, OK, and I had never heard about the Tulsa race riot until it was presented in the graphic novel “The Watchmen”. I had also not know about the murders of Osage tribe members described in the novel “Killers of the Flower Moon”. And I have learned that there was a similar event to the Tulsa riot in 1918 that was 4 miles from my house, in Dewey, OK.
Why do people of the MAGA persuasion want to deny these events? They are afraid to confront the totality of real history because it does not coincide with their vision of the “Golden Years” of America, a mythical history that never was. Right out of the Totalitarian’s Playbook.
Wait until KIrk’s /Beckwith’s people get into our schools.
It is sad, in a way, that the MAGA folks have such a fragile sense of self that it threatens to break down with the merest mention of some unsavory American history, you know things that actually happened…on the way to today.
Mitch D; thank you for your choice of words to describe history, “…on the way to today”. Those few words say a lot that resounds for those of us who have so often stated, “I’m glad I am old.” I will be 89 next month and have seen and learned much more after my school years when I realized how little is taught in our schools and how much we do not know about what happened here “…on the way to today.”
In high school, I learned about the Louisiana Purchase. Woo Hoo for the US and westward expansion. They never mentioned that money we sent to France went on to finance a war that convulsed most of Europe for a dozen years.
As for TPUSA, every good dictatorship needs a good government sponsored indoctrination program.
Jo
Ann, you are welcome.
The efforts of Trump, and his gang fools to re-write American history put me in mind of several things, the nicest of them is this song, by Sinatra, which expresses what counts.
“The House I Live In:
“The House I Live In”
What is America to me?
A name, a map, or a flag I see?
A certain word, “democracy”?
What is America to me?
The house I live in, a plot of earth, a street
The grocer and the butcher, and the people that I meet
The children in the playground, the faces that I see
All races and religions, that’s America to me
The place I work in, the worker by my side
The little town or city where my people lived and died
The “howdy” and the handshake, the air of feeling free
And the right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me
The things I see about me, the big things and the small
The little corner newsstand and the house a mile tall
The wedding in the churchyard, the laughter and the tears
The dream that’s been a-growin’ for a hundred and fifty years
The town I live in, the street, the house, the room
The pavement of the city, or a garden all in bloom
The church, the school, the clubhouse, the millions lights I see
But especially the people
That’s America to me.
Thanks to all, something else I knew not much about.
Except the parts I lived through.
Recall the line “History will tell lies as usual.”? How prescient! But, you know, the efforts to repress and rewrite is bringing attention to what many of us experienced in our youth in school, and did not learn, and this effort will backfire, serving to provide what we missed and should have learned. We can learn it now. The attention given to Civic Literacy Week, last week, and what it has already spawned is promising.
I apologize….meant to include the reference to that line about history and got carried away with my own. That line appears in “The Devil’s Disciple,” another superb smack by George Bernard Shaw.
Covering up, obfuscating lying is second nature for the trump regime. Trying to indoctrinate Americans into their way is a backwards, stifling approach to life. Back in grade school (catholic) the nuns taught about the trail of tears, some of slavery, and the holocaust. They seemed to be experts in relaying the human suffering in the world. Today their focus is on the plight of immigrants. They were not good about letting us recognize our talents, efforts beyond the group.
Maga officials look so dishonest and controlling. they’re making a mess of things with their incompetence. i.e. firing the seasoned counterintelligence agents who would have known to obtained current information regarding where the military strikes were going. Their gong- ho glorification of war and incompetence killed many young innocent schoolgirls. That’s who this trump regime is. They spend our resources to grift for themselves with absolutely no regard for the truth or this country. They are paving a highway to hell!
I didn’t learn about those things in school, either but my parents were, as I’ve said many times, great readers. IIRC, my family took a vacation when I was five. We went to Michigan. It was an actual excursion stopping where and when we wanted. One stop was in Pokegan State Park in Northern Indiana. I read a plaque about the Potowatami tribe that was forced to join the Trail of Tears. I asked my parents and they told me the story. They knew it well. They must have been told in high school.
I’ve always been a history nut and I spent hours in the adult section of the local library. I learned about Tulsa, Wounded Knee, lynchings in Indiana and elsewhere. I read newspaper and magazines that told the Emmett Till story. I followed the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner story as it happened.
It’s harder to rewrite history while there are still people alive to talk about what really happened. Talk to the old people around you. That’s how I learned about Tulsa and Rosewood