Opinion | Trump’s order to The Smithsonian distorts the teaching of American history
Thursday Trump issued a Executive order“Restore the truth and health care to American history”.
In the usual duration of Mr. Trump, the order explodes with accusations Against nameless people who presumably are my historical companions and museum curators for our “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite the history of our nation”.
The repeated invocation of the order of the Smithsonian Institution now echoes right objectives now familiar with the 2025 project and elsewhere: By putting an end to the alleged “awakened” agendas on race and gender, creating “parents’ rights” and school choices and promoting history in line with the “values” of the founders.
According to the president, the “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative guided by ideology”. And then comes that penetrating epithet, the organizational logic of the order: the desire to put an end to the “revisionist movement” carried out by names without name.
I remember that a great historian, Prof. James HortonHe had a touching answer to this label: “Would you like your doctors to be revisionists?” Any field of study must innovate to maintain relevance. The hypothesis that there is a standard and agreed truth about the country’s past is a imagination. But when declared by an seated American president, it becomes a provocation and an insult.
The order is nothing more than a declaration of political war on the profession of historians, our training and integrity, as well as freedom – in the form of curious minds – of anyone who tries to understand our country by visiting museums or historical sites.
Writing in 1980, in what could have seemed more placid and full of hope, the historian John Hope Franklin observed the “transformation” of the scholarship on American history in many new robust fields, as well as an explosion of popular interest in the proliferation of historical companies, sites and museums.
The state and local archives had emerged throughout the country and the enormous observance of 1976 of the US bicentenary built a flourishing audience for all historical things. Documentary films and films had also become referees and suppliers of history, for better or for worse. Amateur genealogists took the archives in search of family stories and historical tourism had never seen such enthusiasm.
Many Americans worry about the country’s past; They can manage the truth: conflicts, tragedies, reimbursements and everything else. In reality they prefer complexity to patriotic shirts. The Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Movement for Civil Rights, the Movements of Women and Gay Rights and the struggle to learn the history of Native Americans have changed America forever. With burning and unresolved memories, almost everyone understood the severity of American history.
In this naive effort to control the way the past is recorded and interpreted, the Trump administration has entered a mined field. While it is not clear how much it will change following the executive order, it is already evident that the administration has started a war that cannot win in the long term.
Even if you agree with some of the positions of the executive order, do we want our cultural centers and the repositories of American history to undergo a litmus test that requires that history be presented in the most positive terms? The administration is committing to the same behavior that it claims to oppose. Attempting to put his stamp on the past, Mr. Trump is a revisionist himself.
The Strategy of the Plans of the President to change the way Smithsonian is clear: for a trumpet a claim – that American historians range a narrative opposite in order to the president of emphasizing the “American greatness” – widely and often enough that people will begin to believe it.
Large lies move as viruses in culture and although we have evidence, facts and ethics on our side, there are no vaccines. The raw intent of this order is to further break the institutions and silence historians.
