National Parks Are Told to Delete Content That ‘Disparages Americans’; The New York Times, June 13, 2025

Lisa Friedman, The New York Times; National Parks Are Told to Delete Content That ‘Disparages Americans’

[Kip Currier: These Interior Department directives of the Trump administration are censorious and should not be normalized in a democracy.

Historical facts and accounts are communal and collective in nature. Historical narratives and chronicles are not the property of an administration to cherry-pick, deselect, deny, clean up, and cover up. Yes, history is interpretative in nature. But history belongs collectively to all of us, not the administrative government in charge at a particular time: the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of history.

Sanitization and censorship of history is what totalitarian and autocratic states do. It's what the current Russian regime has done in whitewashing and rehabilitating the reputation of Stalin and Soviet Russia by closing down museums that present facts the Putin government does not approve of. It's what the present one-party state in China has done in squelching any mention of the Tiananmen Square student-led protests of 1989. It's also what Donald Trump has done in referring to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol as a "day of love" and calling the insurrectionists "hostages". And it's what the Pentagon has wreaked in purging historical figures from its websites and removing books from its academy and military base libraries.

George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949, four years after the Allied nations' defeat of the fascist Axis powers in 1945) warns us where this kind of state-sanctioned censorship can lead. A 2024 Smithsonian article ("What Does George Orwell's '1984' Mean in 2024?") on the 75th anniversary of the book identifies its most important themes as:

"the denial of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. … That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-does-george-orwells-1984-mean-in-2024-180984468/

1984 describes the fictional Oceania totalitarian super-state's so-called Ministry of Truth: a department and policy approach that rewrites and represses history. It spreads propaganda. It inverts truth: 

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

 

Will more teachers and faculty members, historians, university and college administrators and boards, librarians, museum curators, archivists, and other U.S. citizens speak out against this administration's autocratic sanitization and suppression of history?]

[Excerpt]

"The Interior Department plans to remove or cover up all “inappropriate content” at national parks and sites by Sept. 17 and is asking the park visitors to report any “negative” information about past or living Americans, according to internal documents.

It’s a move that historians worry could lead to the erasure of history involving gay and transgender figures, civil rights struggles and other subjects deemed improper by the Trump administration.

Staff at the National Park Service, which is part of the Interior Department, were instructed to post QR codes and signs at all 433 national parks, monuments and historic sites by Friday asking visitors to flag anything they think should be changed, from a plaque to a park ranger’s tour to a film at a visitor’s center.

Leaders at the park service would then review concerns about anything that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times),” according to slides presented this week at a meeting with park superintendents. By Sept. 17, “all inappropriate content” would be removed or covered, according to the presentation."