Today’s Americans are demanding the preservation not just of who we have been, but of who we are.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of a whitewashed authoritarianism. The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been. Volunteers worried at the potential loss of National Park Service information created the Save Our Signs project, a crowd-sourced archive of photographs from National Parks. Historians appalled by changes to the Smithsonian created Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, similarly documenting changes to the Smithsonian. One of its leaders, James Millward, is a scholar of Chinese history and is concerned that “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared” looks a great deal like the methods of the Chinese Communist Party. Sitting next to Trump’s portrait in the Portrait Gallery, he handed visitors copies of the old text until guards closed the exhibit.
