A famous photograph of a fugitive slave being brutally whipped during the Civil War. A detailed exhibition detailing how more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly imprisoned during World War II. A sign explaining the effects of climate change on the Maine coast.
In recent months, a small army of historians, librarians, scientists and other volunteers has been deployed to America’s national parks and museums, photographing and painstakingly archiving cultural and intellectual property that they fear is under threat from President Trump’s war on the “woke”.
These volunteers are creating a “civic record” of what currently exists in case the administration carries out President Trump’s orders to remove public signage and expressions that he and his allies deem too negative about America’s past.
“My deepest, darkest fear is that the administration plans to “rewrite and falsify who counts as an American,” said Chandra Manning, a history professor at Georgetown University who helped organize the effort called.
In March, President Trump issued an executive order claiming that over the past decade, signs and exhibits at museums and parks across the country have been distorted by a “broad effort to rewrite our nation’s history,” substituting liberal ideology for fact.
“Under this historical revision, our nation’s unique legacy of promoting freedom, individual rights, and human well-being will be recast as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” he wrote.
He ordered the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution to remove content that “inappropriately disparages Americans,” living or dead, and replaces it with language that celebrates the nation’s greatness.
That’s when Manning recalled how her colleague at Georgetown University, James Millward, who specializes in Chinese history, told her, “This is really creepy.” He said it was reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party’s mandate to “tell China’s story well,” which is a code of censorship and falsification.
So the professors reached out to friends and discovered that there were like-minded people all over the country working like medieval “monks” painstakingly copying ancient texts to photograph and preserve what they considered national treasures.
“There’s a human tradition of doing exactly this,” Manning says. “I’m happy to be part of that tradition. It makes me feel less isolated and alone.”
Jenny McBurney, a government documents librarian at the University of Minnesota, said she found Trump’s language “pretty dystopian.” That’s why she helped organize an initiative called , which aims to photograph and preserve all exhibits in national parks and monuments.
This vast network includes Manzanar National Historic Site, where Japanese American civilians were imprisoned during World War II. Fort Sumter National Monument, where Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Civil War. Ford’s Theater National Historic Site in Washington, DC, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. and Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.
It would be difficult to tell these stories without disrespecting at least some dead Americans, such as assassins John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray, or violating President Trump’s mandate to focus on America’s “unparalleled record of freedom, prosperity and human flourishing.”
In Maine’s Acadia National Park, where the sun shines for the first time on the U.S. coast for most of the year, signs marking the impact of climate change on rising sea levels, storm surges and heavy rains have already been removed.
McBurney said in a recent interview that she doesn’t want volunteers to predict the federal government’s next move and focus only on exhibits that are likely to change; she wants to preserve everything, “the good, the bad, the negative, whatever.” “As a librarian, I like complete sets.”
And if a complete archive of every sign in the National Park System was kept in private hands, beyond the reach of the current administration, there would always be a “before” photo to look back on and see what had changed.
“We don’t want this information to disappear into the darkness,” McBurney said.
Another group, the , is hard at work filling private servers with compromised databases, including health data from the Centers for Disease Control, climate data from the Environmental Protection Agency, and content from government websites, many of which are subject to the same kind of ideological erasure threatened at parks and museums.
Both efforts were “really inspirational,” Manning said, and she and Millward thought about what they could do to contribute to the cause.
Then, in August, the Trump administration, apparently frustrated by the lack of prompt compliance with the directive, sent a formal letter to Ronnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s first black director, setting a 120-day deadline to “begin implementation of the amendments.”
A few days later, President Trump made his case less formally on his own media platforms.
“The Smithsonian Institution is out of control,” he wrote. “All that’s being discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery is, and how underachieving our downtrodden people are.”
Despite the Smithsonian’s praise of Americans and Americans, President Trump complained that the museum offered nothing about America’s “success” or “brilliance,” concluding: “We have the ‘hottest’ country in the world, and we want people to talk about it.”
Manning and Millward quickly realized where their focus should be.
They emailed people they knew and reached out to local listservs to see if anyone could help document exhibits at the 21 museums that make up the Smithsonian, including the American History Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the National Zoo, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Within about two weeks, 600 volunteers had gathered. Over time, Manning said, the group grew to more than 1,600 people, more than they could allocate to galleries and exhibitions.
“Many people are upset and kind of paralyzed by the repeated attacks on our shared resources and our shared institutions, and they don’t really know what to do about it,” Manning said.
Thanks to all the volunteers and the help of graduate student Jessica Dickenson Goodman, who had the computer skills to help archive the submissions, the Citizen Historian Project now has an archive of more than 50,000 photos and videos covering all sites. They finished their work on October 12, the same day the museum was closed due to the government shutdown.
After multiple media outlets reported on an order to remove photos of whipped slaves from Georgia’s Fort Pulaski National Monument, administration officials described the report as “misinformation” but did not say which part was wrong, citing internal emails or people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
A National Park Service spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
But it’s the possibility that the administration is considering removing the Scourged Back photos that has prompted Manning and many others to devote time to preserving historical records.
“I think we need a story that says sometimes wrong happens and it’s possible to do something about it,” Manning said.
The man in the photo escaped and joined the Union Army, where he participated in the fight to abolish slavery in the United States. When such powerful images disappear from public view, “we rob ourselves of the reminder that it is possible to do something about what is wrong.”
