Silver Lining? How White House Censorship Energizes the Public’s Love of History.

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the Organization of American Historians.

If you’ve been reading about the fight to restore interpretation of slavery at the President’s House in Philadelphia, here’s an alert: removal and silencing of history is likely happening in your own neighborhood, too.

Many of the histories censored by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) and Department of the Interior lack the ready-to-mobilize civic defenders and supportive media that strengthen us here in Philadelphia. However, grassroots efforts, including the exceptional website Save Our Signs, indicate that lovers of history and believers in science everywhere are taking action.

At the President’s House we learned that a mobilization of outraged historians writing and speaking in defense of suppressed truths amplifies and adds credibility to popular activism. Working together, activists and scholars can successfully realize history’s power for American communities. Defense of sound history is our core mission as scholars, because as crucial as it is to have accurate signage restored, it’s even more urgent to prevent the normalizing of an official design to deceive and silence the American people. When we speak for sound history, we speak for a democratic future.

[R]emoval and silencing of history is likely happening in your own neighborhood, too.

The Trump administration’s campaign against history in our national parks and historic sites began in 2017. It gained focus on April 23, 2025 with Executive Order 14253. The order called for the identification and elimination of “inappropriately disparag[ing]” content in National Park interpretation, to be performed by and at the cost of, the Department of the Interior. The Washington Post described the NPS as “broadly interpreting” the directives “to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights, or persecution of Indigenous people.” In January 2026, a second order targeted references to climate change and environmental degradation.

Compliance with these orders has involved NPS staff in a variety of moves against accurate content across the nation:

• At the Medgar and Myrlie Evans house in Jackson, Mississippi, NPS confiscated brochures and ordered site personnel to deny key explanations to visitors. They were to refuse to explain the stains from Mr. Evers’s blood on the driveway where he was shot. They were to cease referring to the Klansman who assassinated Evers’ as “a racist,” and presumably ignore that the White Citizens Council paid for the defense attorneys who secured two hung juries for the assassin. New brochures were delivered to the site months later with the proscribed content removed. Following an outcry from the public, the brochures were reportedly returned.

• At the President’s House in Philadelphia, a struggle I have been involved with since 2001, NPS also confiscated interpretive resources, this time by removing wall panels. Alternative panels recently displayed on the NPS website shrink the history of the Washingtons as enslavers, are silent on the brutality of enslavement and the resourcefulness of free African Americans, and exaggerate the unease felt by various Founders about slavery. Worse yet, NPS added interpretation completely irrelevant to the site, such as histories of the centennial celebrations since 1876, of the Civil War and emancipation, and Civil Rights.

• At the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, NPS has silenced video interpretation that offends administration sensibilities. The video suppressed at Lowell, available on the website of U.S. Senator Edward Markey (D-MA)’s website, celebrates successive waves of immigration and their lasting positive impact on the city, alongside working women and their willingness to strike for fair wages and conditions. The video also addresses the environmental degradation caused by the textile factories, their flight South in search of cheap labor, and the work of the late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas (D-MA) to secure national park designation. NPS has not indicated their specific objections.

• Compliance in other places reflects strategies of delay and politicizing of history. The long-awaited National Museum of Women’s History for the National Mall hit a roadblock when U.S. Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) attached interpretive stipulations to HR 1329, which had strong bipartisan support. In an unprecedented interference with internal curatorial decision-making, Miller demanded that no transgender women be interpreted in the Museum at all, and that President Trump be given sole authority to name a location for the proposed building. Miller’s stipulation against trans women would exclude such pioneers as Lyn Conway, who revolutionized microchip design and paved the way for cell phones, and Congresswoman Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first openly trans woman elected to Congress. With support for Miller’s amendments from her Republican colleagues and opposition from her Democratic colleagues on the House Administration Committee, the National Museum of Women’s History returned to the limbo it has hung in for six years.

• In another front of the administration’s attack on queer Americans, the NPS at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City have removed the “T,” “Q,” and “+” from all mentions of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement. Several of the most visible leaders of the 1969 uprising against police harassment at Stonewall were trans women and their erasure renders the history utterly incoherent.

• At Little Bighorn National Monument. NPS removed signs that explained the litany of broken treaties and the relentless coercive abuse of Indigenous children at church-run “Indian boarding schools” in the last decades of the 19^th century. These abuses, and continued land theft, preceded and incited the 1876 battle at the Little Bighorn River. Without this history, how are visitors to understand why Indigenous warriors chose to fight and die there? The sign removal also has muddied the historical fact of Sitting Bull’s victory over Custer and the 7th cavalry.

• The NPS also removed signs at Glacier National Park pointing out how much the glaciers have receded, that they may disappear altogether, and that human-driven climate change is a principal cause.

• At Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, NPS officials removed signs alerting visitors to the prospect that rising sea levels could destroy the famous site where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

• Acadia National Park saw signs removed that explained the fragility of its meadows with reference to human-caused climate change and honored the Wabanaki nation as ancient occupants and stewards of the land. Sharing ecological science at all three parks helped to educate the visiting public about the stakes of continued heavy fossil fuel consumption, prepare people for the costs of preservation (an estimated $1.1 billion at Fort Sumter alone) and highlight the innovative professional work of Park staff in preserving vulnerable natural and architectural resources.

• If the removals were not so startlingly vicious, they could be almost laughable. At the Hubbell Trading Post National Historical Park in Ganado, Arizona, NPS has threatened to remove signs paying tribute to Ganado Mucho, a Navajo rancher for whom the town is named. Mucho was famous locally, and should surely be better known nationally, for his efforts to make and keep the peace between Indigenous and White ranchers.
  

• The U.S. Army has followed White House demands to eliminate so-called DEI categories on its website at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery. As a result, Black, Hispanic, LGBTQ+, and White female veterans’ names have been removed, including Medal of Honor winners, and not coincidentally, the name of Medgar Evers. Spokespeople claim that names will only appear now if the person named has achieved something notable in a substantive area like technological innovation, leadership, etc. Hilariously, the ham-handed project tripped itself up, eliminating photos of the (all-white, all male) crew of the bomber Enola Gay, who dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan in 1945.

• A profoundly wrenching target of administration censorship is at California’s John Muir Woods National Monument. Staff there had created a sign they called “History under Construction” that engaged visitors in how professionals make choices as they narrate the past. History under Construction acknowledges recently recovered histories of Muir’s bad faith toward local Coast Miwok peoples and the important role played by a group of San Francisco women in advocating for preservation of the Woods before Theodore Roosevelt or Gifford Pinchot got involved.

In a brave embrace of this challenge to their authority, Park staff decided to use these emerging stories to show visitors how “history comes into being.” History under Construction sets the recovered narratives alongside the older ones, indicating how the new stories challenged and deepened the older ones. Muir Woods solicited public reaction to the complexities of the new sign and found it overwhelmingly favorable. People especially embraced being able to read both versions and decide for themselves. History under Construction represented a pinnacle of professional public history practice. Unfortunately, history as a malleable process seems to have offended under the terms of Executive Order 14253, and it came down. First rate professional practice, like the best research and the most inclusive interpretation, frightens today’s self-styled leaders the most.

None of this is happening without resistance.

None of this is happening without resistance. Muir Woods Park staff have encouraged the public to email protests to the national office.

• In Montana, the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council and local schoolteacher Lucy Red Bird pointedly added the suppressed material to her classroom curriculum.

• Senator Markey’s publication of the suppressed Lowell video is another form of resistance, echoed by the grassroots website Save our Signs and efforts at the Philadelphia President’s House to print and post digital images of the censored materials as well as to occupy the site and share the missing history with visitors.

Meanwhile, state, local, and grassroots resistance continues. The city of Philadelphia successfully sued the US Department of the Interior and Secretary Doug Burgum for the restoration of President’s House signage, a case now under appeal before the Third Circuit. Maine lawmakers led by Representative Gary Friedman (D-Bar Harbor) moved to defend science at Acadia National Park through state legislation.

As at Muir Woods, Cuyahoga Valley National Park staff solicited reactions from visitors to the mandate for censorship. Park visitors overwhelmingly endorsed telling full histories and accurate science, even when this content made them uncomfortable or unhappy. At Muir Woods, a visitor noted, “The only thing that disparages Americans is taking away our ability to think critically for ourselves.” One Cuyahoga visitor indicated her sense that “I think we’re going backwards, to tell you the truth.”

Some resistance mobilized humor. At the Amache Japanese internment camp site in Granada, Colorado, an anonymous objector lampooned administration whitewashing with this flyer posted on the site’s front gate.

“It was the Spring of 1942 and President Roosevelt decided to treat people of Japanese descent [to] a fabulous free vacation at one of ten luxury resorts built just for the occasion. The lucky Japanese boarded trains to get to the resorts, leaving all their troubles behind, as well as their homes, companies, and their material belongings. Some of the children of the lucky guests were taken on trips to Europe and the Pacific …Many of these were awarded citations, in some cases posthumously.” The writer concluded, tongue firmly in cheek, that this certainly was, “a once in a lifetime experience that none would ever forget.”

National voices have also been raised in resistance. The Organization of American Historians, which partnered with INHP, local scholars, and activists in writing the original President’s House texts, has issued multiple statements opposing Executive Order 14253. They, along with OutHistory, also have generated Freedom of Information requests to learn Interior’s plans for removing and rewriting signage.

The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit, regularly covers specific removals and acts of resistance in National Parks Traveler; for example, in support of a legal filing in Massachusetts, the NPCA gathered a coalition of organizations, including the Association of Park Rangers, the American Association of State and Local History, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, to lend credibility to the legal case. In press releases, NPCA has supported Democracy Forward’s assertion that “We the people deserve and demand a national park system that tells true stories of Black communities, Indigenous tribes, and countless other … chapters of our history.” In support of such sentiments, U.S. Senator Markey and his Senate colleague Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) are recruiting support for a stipulation in the 2027 Federal appropriations bill to prohibit tax dollars being spent on removing interpretive material from the national parks.

These national scholarly, advocacy, and visitor-driven organizations have created a chorus in support of honest history and science at federal sites. But the challenge of focusing these multiple forms of resistance into a movement powerful enough to turn back this Orwellian tide remains before us. Public concern needs to reach the ears of both legislators and candidates; amicus briefs could strengthen lawsuits at all levels, especially during the inevitable appeals.

Many professional Park rangers are caught in the middle and need public and scholarly support. Educators around the nation could help by spreading the knowledge of what’s being lost in classrooms and museums. Journalists, online and in print, and opinion writers could mobilize more citizen action. Taxi drivers and food truck operators could post removed materials on their vehicles; people could place images of lost signs in their windows. Small things matter. Even in places where settlement is sparse, voices need to be empowered and mobilized. No matter who or where you are, you could play a critical role in halting the vandalizing of our history, our ecological future, and our greatest treasures, the National Parks.

Dr. Sharon Ann Holt, author of Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865-1900, divided her career between academic teaching and public history practice at organizations in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and New Jersey. She retired in 2023 from Pennsylvania State University, Abington, currently resides in Philadelphia, and continues to work as a scholar and public history consultant.