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Foreign. 20:26 the Trump administration is trying to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life. In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the blood and soil ideology of Germany in the 1930s. Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America's How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History, or nmah, fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage. Heritage, it continued, our central finding is not that the museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that the museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens. Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hardig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country. The report claims that the National Museum of American History purposely presents America as a problematic country, irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the museum's current telling, the country is above all defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice. It claims that the founders are minimized or excluded, and that the story told of the nation is one of regret, tragedy, and shame. It claims the museum has a longtime staff reading group devoted to a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that the National Museum of American History engages in illegal alien activism and transgender activism. It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon foundation, which, an endnote explains, allotted $72 million to racial justice projects. Indeed, the authors of the report appear to be most exercised over racism shown in their anger over the museum's presentation of human enslavement. They said the National Museum of American History should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices and how America's founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery. They want the museum to emphasize how 750,000Americans died in the Civil War. They did not appear to want mention that 258,000 of them died to protect enslavement and how Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation. It should tell how the United States has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any any other nation in the world. Part of that, the report says, should include America's contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people. The White House report is a nakedly political document seeking to prove that the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI astonishing degree. It builds on Trump's belief that the Smithsonian has an improper ideology that Trump says is too focused on how bad slavery was. That political purpose was clear on July 21, when Hardig and Yale University US historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian, Mike Gonzalez of the right wing Heritage foundation and Matthew Spalding from Michigan's Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration committee continued the same themes. Harding told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying, we unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum. In fact, the report ignores large long term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the US Military currently on display. That exhibit includes George Washington's sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox Surrender in favor of past temporary revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall. The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth called Girlhood It's Complicated closed more than three years ago. In her testimony, Harding responded to the report's accusation that the museum fails to substantively present America's founders and founding. As Kelsey Abels of the Atlantic reported, Harding pointed out, we have a dozen exhibitions that include the Founding era right now. 368 objects, 340 labels. George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Baring hall of Military History to get to a 15 foot tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. But in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a strawman for MAGA supporters to hate Ben Davis of Artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican of South Carolina, claimed Hardig strives to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination and grooming of kids at an American history museum and demanded, do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country? Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, repeatedly demanded of Hardig where The exhibitions honoring 50 million aborted babies are. Representative Eric Burleson, a Republican of Missouri, demanded, do you love America? I love this country unconditionally. Harding replied she would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media. In a response to the administration's report, Representative Joe Morelli of New York, the top ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, for sharing the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination. Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today, Morelli writes. Instead, the president changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it. Morelli pointed out that the White House report demonized Hardig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement loving America is very complicated. While omitting that, she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans, it attacked her use of the common historical term problematize, which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize, criticizing her statement that the profession has to figure out how we're going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence in 2026. Morelli points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it. The full sentence we have to figure out altogether how we're going to commemorate, problematize, remember and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence in 2026. The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the U.S. the president doesn't control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report's authors could recommend was a label at every entrance that reads warning the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country. On July 24, the President issued Executive Order 14415 titled Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution it ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the museum. As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff, who will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. And it's likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment. Earlier this month, Bridget Gillespie, a former intern at Jefferson's home, Monticello, detailed in the American Prospect how that harassment accusations of wokeness reviews, calling tour guides morons, visitors in pairs, with one asking something provocative about slavery or states rights, while the other films changed the way interpreters operated. History is not just a set of facts and events. It's the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail? Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers, not just about the way Jim and Juan Crow worked, but also about whether our country's foundation is about race and land or, as the Founders said, about principles and the rule of law.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.