Can You Believe the Documentary You’re Watching?; The New York Times, November 18, 2025

Alissa Wilkinson , The New York Times; Can You Believe the Documentary You’re Watching?

"Like a surging viral outbreak, A.I.-generated video has suddenly become inescapable. It’s infiltrated our social feeds and wormed its way into political discourse. But documentarians have been bracing for impact since before most of us even knew what the technology could do.

Documentaries fundamentally traffic in issues of truth, transparency and trust. If they use so-called synthetic materials but present them as if they’re “real,” it’s not just a betrayal of the tacit contract between filmmaker and audience. The implications are far broader, and far more serious: a century of shared history is in jeopardy.

At a time when the idea of facts and shared reality is assaulted from every side, the turning point has arrived. The stakes couldn’t be higher. And we all need to pay attention."

Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved; CNN, November 16, 2025

Hadas Gold , CNN; Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved

"The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.

For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.

Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.

It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all."

Netherlands WWII cemetery removes displays honoring Black soldiers; Military Times, November 14, 2025

Claire Barrett, Military Times; Netherlands WWII cemetery removes displays honoring Black soldiers

[Kip Currier: Reading this story, I was struck by how important it is to raise our awareness of people and events whose stories and contributions often are either unknown or not as well-recognized by more people as they should be. 

That anyone would learn about the service and contributions of Black American soldiers in the Netherlands during WWII and be troubled that their stories are included in the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Margraten is an outrage. 

How dare the Heritage Foundation -- and even more, the Trump 2.0 administration that has codified these kinds of historical purges -- strive to erase this history and these Black American military members and their service from this Dutch museum.

Thank you to all those who are sounding the alarm about another example of this kind of historical censorship.]

[Excerpt]

 "The Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Margraten, the only American military cemetery in the Netherlands, has quietly removed panels displaying the contributions of Black American soldiers during WWII, sparking outrage from Dutch and American citizens.

One of the two displays featured an overall history of Black American military personnel fighting a double V campaign — victory at home and abroad — while the other told the story of George H. Pruitt, a Black soldier in the 43rd Signal Construction Battalion who drowned a month after the war’s end while attempting to save a comrade’s life in a German river.

The two panels were added to the visitor center in September 2024 after the American Battle Monuments Commission, a U.S. government agency that oversees the cemetery, received criticism from families and historians for not including the contributions of Black service members and their experiences fighting in the Netherlands.

At the time of publishing, ABMC did not respond to requests for comment from Military Times. The commission, however, told Dutch news outlets that one panel is“off display, though not out of rotation,” although a second panel was “retired.” 

The panels were reportedly rotated out in early March, one month after President Donald Trump’s executive order terminated diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives across the federal government.

The same month the panels were removed, The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, contacted the ABMC for its supposed failure to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives...

Among such men was 1st Sgt. Jefferson Wiggins of the 960th Quartermaster Service Company, one of more than 900,000 Black men and women who served in the U.S. military during WWII.

Wiggins and the men of the 960th QSC were tasked with the grim job of burying American dead in Margraten.

What was once a fruit orchard would become the final resting place for some 8,300 U.S. soldiers, including 172 Black servicemen. In 2009, Wiggins recounted to historian Mieke Kirkels how the work was done under horrific conditions, often with only rudimentary tools like pickaxes and shovels to dig the graves. 

“There was a permanent arrival of bodies, the whole day long. Sundays included, seven days a week,” Wiggins recalled. “I find it difficult, even now, to read in the paper that soldiers ‘gave their lives.’ … All those boys in Margraten, their lives were taken away.”"

State Department deleted records about risk of inadvertent nuclear war; The Washington Post, November 13, 2025

Nate Jones , The Washington Post; State Department deleted records about risk of inadvertent nuclear war

"I blinked and blinked again, until I was finally satisfied that I was not hallucinating: Key historical records had been removed without explanation.

The State Department had deleted history.

Let me back up. Since 1991, the department has been required by law to publish “a thorough, accurate, and reliable” history of U.S. foreign policy within 30 years of the events. It does this in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, curated collections of primary source documents abbreviated as FRUS.

The State Department has published more than 450 volumes, which include thousands of primary source records detailing the crafting of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Lincoln administration. The thick, bound ruby buckram volumes are a staple on the bookshelves of many college history departments where they remain an invaluable tool for students, scholars and authors.

But in the internet era, FRUS has become a predominantly digital publication, hosted on the State Department’s website.

And it is easier to delete digital records than to destroy books.

This January, the State Department did just that when it republished on its website a volume about the Reagan administration — without 15 pages on the risk of inadvertent nuclear war sparked by a 1983 NATO exercise."

I Photographed an Appalachian Family for 15 Years; The New York Times, November 6, 2025

Photographs by Maddie McGarvey

Text by Emi Nietfeld

, The New York Times; I Photographed an Appalachian Family for 15 Years

[Kip Currier: This is a remarkable photographic essay shedding light on individual lived experiences in Appalachian Ohio, but also shared human connections and universal emotions of fear, longing, uncertainty, desperation, hope, and resilience.

I came away from the piece, probably like many other readers, wondering in what ways we as individuals and societies can provide more infrastructure and services -- not less -- to help fellow humans to break out of cycles of poverty and need.

The piece is even more poignant in light of the current government shutdown and disruptions in SNAP food assistance benefits for more than 40 million Americans.]

[Excerpt]

"Today, the toddler who ran playfully through Ms. McGarvey’s photographs is a high school graduate facing an uncertain future. Through her childhood and adolescence, Paige raised herself and took care of her younger brothers while her family moved frequently between small coal towns, without a stable place to land.

When I saw Ms. McGarvey’s project, I felt an immediate connection to Paige. As a teen I spent time in foster care and bounced between sleeping on friends’ sofas, in my car or in a shelter. The details in the photographs transported me back to that turbulent period: the detritus piled on the broken stovetop; the hours hanging out at McDonald’s; the world dissolving into weariness before you’re even old enough to drive.

Most of all, I recognized Ms. McGarvey’s project as an act of witnessing, documenting one family’s life in its daily tenderness, ordinary suffering and full complexity."

Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost; Ars Technica, November 3, 2025

  ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

"This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas."

Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image; The Guardian, October 2, 2025

Deborah Cole , The Guardian; Historian uses AI to help identify Nazi in notorious Holocaust murder image

"It is one of the most chilling images of the Holocaust: a bespectacled Nazi soldier trains a pistol at the head of a resigned man kneeling in a suit before a pit full of corpses. German troops encircle the scene.

The picture taken in today’s Ukraine was long known, mistakenly, as The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, and was for decades shrouded in mystery.

The US-based German historian Jürgen Matthäus has for years painstakingly assembled the puzzle pieces and, with the help of artificial intelligence, is confident he has identified the killer."

National parks remove signs about climate, slavery and Japanese detention; The Washington Post, September 20, 2025

 Jake Spring, The Washington Post; National parks remove signs about climate, slavery and Japanese detention

"The National Park Service has removed signs at Acadia National Park in Maine that make reference to climate change amid the Trump administration’s wider effort to remove information that it says undermines “the remarkable achievements of the United States.” A sign has also been removed from at least one additional park that referred to slavery, the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and conflicts with Native Americans.

The removals come after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to remove “improper partisan ideology” from federal institutions, including the Smithsonian museums, that he says was perpetuated by the Biden administration. Park Service officials have broadly interpreted the order to apply to information on racism, sexism, Indigenous persecution, gay rights and climate change."

Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past; Library Journal, September 2, 2025

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past

"The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.  

Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age. 

Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.

With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope."

Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.; The Washington Post, August 26, 2025

Matt Bai

, The Washington Post; Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.

"I chose this moment to visit the museum because I wanted to see if President Donald Trump’s criticism of the Smithsonian was just his latest expression of resurgent white nationalism — or whether he had a point...

The bottom floors are devoted to, as Trump put it, “how bad Slavery was” — befitting a chapter that not only defined the Black experience in America, but also figured centrally in the Civil War and the country’s social unraveling in the 20th century. No half-intelligent or half-moral person could find anything good to say about slavery, but neither could anything about the museum’s exhibits be construed as anti-White...

I didn’t leave the museum mourning for my country. I left it, as I suspect most of the tourists around me did, stunned by the brutality of American racism but also marveling at the distance the country has traveled — even if we occasionally fall back along the way.

And this is where I fundamentally disagree with Trump and his little band of cultural revolutionaries. I, too, stand by the concept of American exceptionalism, which a lot of my Democratic friends reject as jingoistic. But the Trumpists get its meaning entirely wrong.

America is exceptional not because God wills it so, or because it has the strongest military, or because capitalism is the best economic system on Earth (although it probably is). We are exceptional because we aspire to an ideal that we know can never be met...

What Trump is doing now — trying to sanitize that story, perhaps because he is incapable of admitting fault himself — is the antithesis of what makes America exceptional. To put a happier, less discomfiting spin on the exhibits in this museum would make us more like Russia or China or North Korea, or any other country where history becomes a strongman’s self-serving fairy tale that no one outside the country believes.

We laugh at those strongmen and their mythologies. A generation from now, if I’m right about the pace of our history and the enduring strengths of our country, we’ll laugh at Trump, too."

We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?; The Guardian, August 22, 2025

Francine Prose , The Guardian; We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?

"The attack on museums, like the assault on education, is meant to convince us that the truth doesn’t matter, that there is no truth, that the wisest course is to blindly accept and repeat whatever lies an authoritarian government chooses to tell.

There’s some disagreement about who first said: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Some claim it was Winston Churchill, others attribute it to George Santayana. But does anyone doubt its veracity?

Perhaps the most nightmarish explanation is that our current administration actually wants us to repeat the most loathsome events of our common past – and to be assured that every act of brutality will disappear from our collective consciousness. There’s a terrifying kind of freedom in knowing that our most odious deeds will be erased from our historical memory, that what we do now will have no consequences – indeed, no reality – in the years to come.

According to the “historically accurate” museum exhibits and history books of the future, there will have been no slavery, there was no discrimination, there were no massacres of our Indigenous population. There was never a time when hard-working, law-abiding immigrant families were separated, when yet more children were stolen from their parents, when, according to the current estimate, 80,000 people – most of them entirely innocent – were imprisoned, when thousands more were kidnapped off the streets and deported from a country they had labored so hard to benefit. And none of this will be mentioned, none of this can be said or written on a wall text, lest we allow the unpatriotic ideologues to make America look bad."

Trump, 79, Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’; The Daily Beast, August 19, 2025

Josh Fiallo  , The Daily Beast; Trump, 79, Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’

"POTUS posted a bizarre screed on Tuesday about museums in Washington, claiming the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” and is fixated on the shortcomings of yesteryear, like documenting the horrors of slavery.

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”...

The president’s complaints did not go unnoticed by lawmakers. California congresswoman and Congressional Black Caucus Whip Sydney Kamlager-Dove retweeted Trump’s message with her own, which stated: “Slavery WAS bad, Donald. It’s absurd that this even needs to be said.”

“We don’t whitewash history,” she continued, “we learn from it.” Before adding: “You keep trying to rewrite the past—@TheBlackCaucus won’t let you get away with it.""

Trump’s Attempt to Make Museums Submit Feels Familiar; The New York Times, August 15, 2025

Michelle Goldberg , The New York Times; Trump’s Attempt to Make Museums Submit Feels Familiar

"Five years ago, many institutions in the United States tried, with varying degrees of seriousness and skill, to come to terms with our country’s legacy of racism. A backlash to this reckoning helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House, where he has taken a whole-of-government approach to wiping out the idea that America has anything to apologize for. As part of this campaign, the administration seeks to force our national museums to conform to its triumphalist version of history.

In March, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” criticizing versions of history that foster “a sense of national shame.” Museums and monuments, it said, should celebrate America’s “extraordinary heritage” and inculcate national pride. This week, the administration announced that it was reviewing displays at eight national museums — including the Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and giving them 120 days to bring their content in line with Trump’s vision.

We’re already seeing glimpses of what that looks like. Last month, the National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit on the American presidency. Those references were restored last week, but with changes: The exhibit no longer says that Trump made “false statements” about the 2020 election or that he encouraged the mob on Jan. 6...

For Pawel Machcewicz, founding director of the Museum of the Second World War, it’s been unsettling to see American museums subject to the sort of political intimidation he experienced in Poland...

Standing up to his government was costly. Machcewicz said he was subject to two separate criminal investigations, and for a time he left the country...

But for now, Machcewicz has the peace that comes from doing the right thing. “If I had capitulated, I would have been a completely frustrated man, because I would feel like someone who has betrayed himself,” he said. It’s a message that those who are tempted to try to appease this administration, at our museums or anywhere else, might remember."

White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions; The New York Times, August 12, 2025

Graham Bowley Jennifer Schuessler and Robin Pogrebin , The New York Times; White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions

[Kip Currier: No museum system is more quintessentially linked to "America's story" than the storied institutions that make up the Smithsonian archipelago. Worryingly, that story is under grave threat of being suppressed and rewritten by a Trumpian tidal wave of revisionism, erasure, and outright censorship of exhibition content.

Cultural heritage institutions -- and all Americans -- must unite in standing up against the risks to our collective history stemming from Trump's August 12, 2025 letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III asserting his intent to replace "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”

Hands Off Our History!]

[Excerpt]

"The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, scouring wall text, websites and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

White House officials announced the review in a letter sent to Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Museums will be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic within 120 days, the letter said, “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”

The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch...

Mr. Trump’s focus on the Smithsonian began in March, when he issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In it, he claimed that the Smithsonian, in particular, had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that it promoted “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Last month, bills were introduced in the House and Senate that would codify the executive order into law."

Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project; The New York Times, August 12, 2025

 Garrett M. Graff , The New York Times; Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project

"The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together."

The Smithsonian Changes Its Description of Trump’s Role on Jan. 6; The New York Times, August 8, 2025

 Graham Bowley, The New York Times; The Smithsonian Changes Its Description of Trump’s Role on Jan. 6

"The Smithsonian put up new text on Friday that changed its description of President Trump’s impeachment following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol."

Smithsonian to restore Trump to impeachment exhibit ‘in the coming weeks’; The Washington Post, August 2, 2025

Jonathan Fischer

 and 

Samantha Chery

, The Washington Post; Smithsonian to restore Trump to impeachment exhibit ‘in the coming weeks’

"The placard mentioning Trump was removed from the exhibition, “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” after what the Smithsonian called a “review” of “legacy content.” A person familiar with the exhibit plans, who was not authorized to discuss them publicly, previously told The Post the placard was removed as part of a content review the Smithsonian undertook following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director."

Smithsonian to restore Trump to impeachment exhibit ‘in the coming weeks’; Associated Press via The Guardian, August 2, 2025

Associated Press via The Guardian, The Washington Post ; Smithsonian to restore Trump to impeachment exhibit ‘in the coming weeks’

"The Smithsonian will include Donald Trump’s two impeachments in an updated presentation “in the coming weeks” after references to them were removed, the museum said in a statement Saturday.

That statement from the Washington DC museum also denied that the Trump administration pressured the Smithsonian to remove the references to his impeachments during his first presidency...

Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice. In 2019, he was impeached for pushing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden, who would later defeat Trump in the 2020 presidential election. And in 2021, he was impeached for “incitement of insurrection,” a reference to the 6 January 2021 attack aimed at the US Capitol by Trump supporters attempting to halt congressional certification of Biden’s victory over him.

The Democratic majority in the House voted each time for impeachment. The Republican-led Senate each time acquitted Trump."

Building presidential library for John Adams and son in Quincy, Massachusetts is of "national importance," CEO says; CBS News, July 31, 2025

 Paula Ebben, 

Paula Ebben, Mike Toole, CBS News; Building presidential library for John Adams and son in Quincy, Massachusetts is of "national importance," CEO says

"A presidential library for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams is a step closer to becoming a reality in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Adams was the nation's second president, and his son was the sixth, but there's no presidential library for either of them."

Stacks of Cash; The New Yorker, August 1, 2025

Jon Allsop; The New Yorker; Stacks of Cash

"The idea of the Presidential library dates to the late nineteen-thirties, when Roosevelt decided to donate his papers to the federal government and move them to a fireproof building near his family home. According to Anthony Clark, a former congressional staffer who has written a book about Presidential libraries, Roosevelt made room to display memorabilia to the public “almost as an afterthought.” Most Presidential libraries would come to house both the paper trail of a Presidency, for researchers to consult, and also a commemorative museum, which is the bit that most tourists actually visit. Over time, these museums grew more ambitious, and sometimes proved to be of questionable historical value. Richard Nixon’s museum initially presented Watergate as a coup, and accused Woodward and Bernstein of bribery.

Roosevelt was under no legal obligation to make his papers publicly available—but since 1978, thanks to Nixon and Watergate, Presidential records have been considered federal property, and are supposed to be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration. There has never been a governmental requirement to open an associated museum, but typically these have also been managed by nara. (Nixon’s was unusual in that it was run privately for many years; in 2007, nara took it over and ripped out and replaced the Watergate exhibit.) Before the government gets involved on the museum side, however, the structures must be planned and built using outside funds, making them, in practice, fuzzy mixes of the public and the private. When Presidential libraries are donated to the government, they must also hand over endowments to help defray future maintenance costs.

Barack Obama broke the mold: his Presidential museum, in Chicago, which somehow is still not open, is an entirely private endeavor, run by a foundation; his official records are being digitized and will continue to be supervised by nara. After this effective divorce of library and museum functions was announced, Clark expressed hope about the arrangement. “What were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history,” he wrote, in Politico. “Even though they are taxpayer-funded and controlled by a federal agency, the private foundations established by former presidents to build the libraries retain outsize influence.” The Obama model would at least keep the government out of the business of hagiography. Not everyone was supportive, however. Timothy Naftali, who was responsible for overhauling the Nixon facility as its first federal director and who is now a historian at Columbia, has argued that the private nature of Obama’s center is an impediment to nonpartisan public history. “It opens the door,” he said, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”"