Reshaping the focus of history

From the first day his administration assumed office this January, President Trump broke all records issuing executive orders. 

He generated 26 on his first day alone. These presidential directives covered a wide swath of topics, from sweeping changes in how the federal government works to signaling his intention to reshape how the country’s stories are told. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, creators of Mr. Trump’s blueprint “Project 2025,” especially welcomed the new administration’s push to influence history and culture, combating what it referred to as “the totalitarian cult identified as the great awokening.”

The president’s “White House Executive Order” of March 27, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” serves as a case in point. It calls for the removal of “divisive, race centered ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, and instructs the Interior Secretary to revoke recent changes to landmarks and monuments if they are found to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” 

It calls for “withholding federal money from programs related to diversity, equality and inclusion or promoting gender ideology,” while it also mandates including a “patriotic” curriculum into K-12 education, accusing schools of indoctrinating children in anti-American ideologies.

Jefferson Cowie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Vanderbilt University, suggests that Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” points to how he wants to portray history. The idea is that he “works on nostalgia for a golden age,” that there is some version of America we need to get back to. This approach hints at an essential divide when interpreting the story of the United States: Is America a country striving to return to former glory, or a nation on a continuous arc of self improvement?

The “Organization of American Historians,” the largest professional society dedicated to U.S. history, warned that Trump”s order to rewrite history to reflect a glorified narrative downplays or erases elements of American history—slavery, discrimination, division—while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups. Angela Diaz, Associate Professor of history at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, observes that a large majority of Americans—for instance women, people of color, the impoverished—did not in fact flourish during the so-called golden era of the past. For many groups, a return to the past would mean “erasing a lot of the legal, economic, political, technological, and social progress that the country has made and calling all of this into question.”

It is, of course, not uncommon that in times of social and political upheaval political leaders seek to refocus the lens of history. History is replete with attempts at erasing unwanted philosophies, often by burning books and documents containing content controversial for the time and threatening established authority. These events took place as recently as the Nazi book burning organized by students during the 1930s and focused on purging literature representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. Even in our own country data shows that since 2021, more than 15,000 books have been banned from libraries across 43 states. Most of these feature characters or stories about people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and those dealing with race and racism.

This does not mean that historical revisionism is somehow illegitimate. The reinterpretation of a historical account by challenging established views using new evidence, questions or perspectives is a legitimate process essential for historiography. However, distorting the past, deliberately misrepresenting historical events to serve ideological agendas or fit a particularly political viewpoint without scientific foundation is not.

The perceptive works of social critic George Orwell illuminated how the control of history could lead us down a slippery slope towards autocracy. He astutely projected that: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The main character in his dystopian novel “1984,” Winston Smith, who secretly rebels against the totalitarian regime of “Oceania,”complaints pointedly: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute to minute. Nothing exists except our endless present in which the party is always right.”

The Trump administration’s push to rewrite American history is stirring up significant controversy, but what kind of lasting effect might it have? According to Vanderbilt’s Cowie: “As long as the data is not lost, it all seems reversible. Essentially, since they are executive orders, they can be reversed by a new regime.”