I teach history in Connecticut, however I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, the place my curiosity within the topic was sparked by visits to native museums.
I fondly keep in mind journeys to the Fellow-Reeves Museum in Wichita, Kansas, and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma Metropolis. A 1908 {photograph} of my great-grandparents choosing cotton has been used as a poster by the Oklahoma Historic Society.
This love of studying historical past continued into my years as a graduate pupil of historical past, after I would spend hours on the Smithsonian Establishment’s Nationwide Air and House Museum studying concerning the historical past of human flight and ballooning. As a professor, I’ve built-in the establishment’s reveals into my historical past programs.
The Trump administration, nevertheless, isn’t proud of the best way the Smithsonian Institution and different U.S. museums are portraying history.
On March 27, 2025, the president issued an government order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which asserted, “Over the previous decade, People have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s historical past, changing goal information with a distorted narrative pushed by ideology somewhat than fact. Underneath this historic revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, particular person rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or in any other case irredeemably flawed.”
Trump singled out just a few museums, together with the Smithsonian, dedicating a complete part of the order on “saving” the establishment from “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
After all, historical past is contested. There’ll at all times be a wide range of views about what should be included and excluded from America’s story. For instance, in my very own analysis, I discovered that Prohibition-era faculty boards within the Twenties argued over whether or not it was acceptable for historical past textbooks to incorporate footage of troopers ingesting for instance the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.
However most up-to-date debates heart on how a lot consideration must be given to the historical past of the nation’s accomplishments over its darker chapters. The Smithsonian, as a nationwide establishment that receives most of its funds from the federal government, has generally discovered itself within the crosshairs.
America’s historic repository
The Smithsonian Establishment was based in 1846 due to its namesake, British chemist James Smithson.
Smithson willed his property to his nephew and said that if his nephew died with out an inheritor, the cash—roughly US$15 million in today’s dollars—could be donated to the U.S. to discovered “an institution for the rise and diffusion of data.”
The thought of a nationwide establishment devoted to historical past, science and studying was contentious from the beginning.
In her e book “The Stranger and the Statesman,” historian Nina Burleigh exhibits how Smithson’s bequest was practically misplaced attributable to battles between competing pursuits.
Southern plantation homeowners and western frontiersmen, together with President Andrew Jackson, noticed the institution of a nationwide museum as an pointless assertion of federal energy. Additionally they challenged the very concept of accepting a present from a non-American and thought that it was beneath the dignity of the federal government to confer immortality on somebody merely due to a big donation.
In the long run, a gaggle led by congressman and former president John Quincy Adams ensured Smithson’s imaginative and prescient was realized. Adams felt that the nation was failing to reside as much as its early promise. He thought a nationwide museum was an essential approach to burnish the beliefs of the younger republic and educate the general public.
At this time, the Smithsonian runs 14 training and analysis facilities, the Nationwide Zoo and 21 museums, together with the Nationwide Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was created with bipartisan assist throughout President George W. Bush’s administration.
Within the introduction to his e book “Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects,” cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin talks about how the establishment has additionally supported a whole bunch of small and enormous establishments exterior of the nation’s capital.
In 2024, the Smithsonian sent over 2 million artifacts on mortgage to museums in 52 U.S. states and territories and 33 international nations. It additionally companions with over 200 affiliate museums. YouGov has periodically tracked Americans’ approval of the Smithsonian, which has held regular at roughly 68% approval and a pair of% disapproval since 2020.
Smithsonian within the crosshairs
Precursors to the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the Smithsonian came about within the Nineties.
In 1991, the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum, which was then referred to as the Nationwide Museum of American Artwork, created an exhibition titled “The West as America, Reinterpreting Photographs of the Frontier, 1820-1920.” Conservatives complained that the museum portrayed western enlargement as a story of conquest and destruction, somewhat than one in all progress and nation-building. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the exhibit represented “a wholly hostile ideological assault on the nation’s founding and historical past.”
The exhibition proved in style: Attendance to the Nationwide Museum of American Artwork was 60% higher than it had been throughout the identical interval the yr prior. However the debate raised questions on whether or not public museums have been in a position to specific concepts which can be crucial of the U.S. with out threat of censorship.
In 1994, controversy once more erupted, this time on the Nationwide Air and House Museum over a forthcoming exhibition centered on the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the primary atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50 years prior.
Ought to the exhibition discover the lack of Japanese lives? Or emphasize the U.S. struggle victory?
Veterans teams insisted that the atomic bomb ended the struggle and saved 1 million American lives, and demanded the removal of images of the destruction and a melted Japanese faculty lunch field from the exhibit. In the meantime, different activists protested the exhibition by arguing {that a} image of human destruction shouldn’t be commemorated at an establishment that’s purported to have fun human achievement.
Republicans received the Home in 1994 and threatened cuts to the Smithsonian’s funds over the Enola Homosexual exhibition, compelling curators to walk a tightrope. In the long run, the fuselage of the Enola Homosexual was displayed within the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Air and House Museum. However the exhibit wouldn’t inform the complete story of the airplane’s position within the struggle from a myriad of views.
Trump enters the fray
In 2019, The New York Occasions launched the 1619 project, which aimed to reframe the nation’s historical past by putting slavery and its penalties at its very heart. The primary Trump administration shortly responded by forming its 1776 fee. In January 2021, it produced a report critiquing the 1619 project, claiming that an emphasis on the nation’s historical past of racism and slavery was counterproductive to selling “patriotic training.”
That very same yr, Trump pledged to construct “an unlimited out of doors park that can function the statues of the best People to ever reside,” with 250 statues to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
President Joe Biden rescinded the order in 2021. Trump reissued it after retaking the White Home, and pointed to figures he’d prefer to see included, resembling Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Betsy Ross, Sitting Bull, Bob Hope, Thurgood Marshall and Whitney Houston.
I don’t assume there’s something flawed with honoring People, although I believe a concentrate on celebrities and main figures clouds the fascinating histories of ordinary Americans. I additionally discover it troubling that there appears to be such a concerted effort to so forcefully form the instructing and understanding of historical past by way of threats and bullying. Yale historian Jason Stanley has written about how aspiring authoritarian governments search to manage historic narratives and discourage an exploration of the complexities of the previous.
Historic scholarship requires an openness to debate and a willingness to embrace new findings and views. It additionally includes the humility to just accept that nobody—least of all the federal government—has a monopoly on the reality.
In his government order, Trump famous that “Museums in our Nation’s capital must be locations the place people go to study.” I share that view. Doing so, nevertheless, means not dismantling historical past, however as a substitute complicating the story—in all its messy glory.
The Dialog U.S. receives funding from the Smithsonian Establishment.
Jennifer Tucker is a professor of historical past at Wesleyan University.
This text is republished from The Conversation underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
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