Why do we keep talking about history on The Convocation Unscripted? Especially when there are midterms coming, immigrants under attack, and a hundred other fires burning right now?
Aside from the obvious—we’re three historians and an honorary historian (😄).
There’s another reason we keep coming back to history…and who gets to tell it.
Why We Keep Coming Back to History
On July 4, the White House released a report on the Smithsonian, then came two congressional hearings about the museums, and now the administration wants warning signs posted outside the National Museum of American History.
Diana said it plainly: “the stories we tell create the possibilities we can imagine.”
If you change the story a nation tells about itself, then you change what that nation believes it can become.
It is also why this administration keeps attacking museums and historians.
The regime wants to define who belongs in America, so it has to narrow the story of the nation.
Yale historian David Blight put it this way in his congressional testimony:
“Historians are not the voices of the state. We are keepers of memory.”
So the fight over the Smithsonian is not a quarrel between two political readings of the same facts. It’s more consequential than that.
As Diana put it, “history becomes an act of whose memory counts.”
Whose stories get saved, and whose get erased, decides who we understand ourselves to be, and who we are willing to fight for.
That is why we keep coming back to history.
Control the past, and you set the boundaries of the future.
History, and whose version we tell, set the bounds on what we are permitted to imagine.
Remembering is not an act of nostalgia but resistance.
The White House’s Saving America’s Story report and its attack on the National Museum of American History
The two July congressional hearings on the Smithsonian, and the push to fire its leadership
Trump’s order to post “inaccurate information” warning signs outside the museum
Why the stories a nation tells shape what it believes it can become
David Blight’s testimony: historians as keepers of memory, not voices of the state
Whose memory gets saved and whose gets erased as the real stake in the history wars
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