At America’s national parks in our current era, the arc of history bends toward revisionism
Brianna Wheeler holds family photos including an image of her grandmother, top right, as she poses for photos at Peninsula Park last month in Portland, Ore. Photo by Jenny Kane / The Associated Press
The Associated Press
By the roiling rapids of converging rivers, President Donald Trump’s campaign to have the government tell a happier story of American history confronts its toughest challenge. There is no positive spin to be put on slavery.
At frozen-in-time Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, people in the National Park Service are navigating shoals that federal storytellers across the nation must now negotiate. How do you tell the truth if it might not be the whole truth?
As part of a broader Trump directive reaching across the government and the country, the park service is under orders to review interpretive materials at all its historical properties and remove or alter descriptions that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or otherwise sully the American story. This comes as the Republican president has complained about institutions that go too deep, in his view, on “how bad slavery was.”
It’s too soon to know whether his directive is causing the arc of history to bend toward sanitized revisionism. There are at least scattered indications that the reviewers may be treading carefully in reshaping America’s core stories.
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