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    The battle over US history reveals our education system’s key flaw | Katherine Kelaidis

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    No part of the Trump 2.0 agenda has been more revealing to the ideological intentions of the administration than the sustained efforts that insist upon a “pro-American” version of history. It is an effort that has taken many forms, including a recent letter sent by the White House to the Smithsonian announcing that there will be a review of the national museums’ semiquincentennial plans to “insure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions”. It is only the latest move in a broader campaign to commandeer the nation’s historical memory, a campaign mirrored in statehouses and school boards across the country, where history curricula have become a central front in the culture wars.Unfortunately, the battle over the past – how we should understand it and, more importantly, how we should teach it – is a conflict for which most Americans today are woefully unprepared. That is because for more than two generations, the US educational system has systematically devalued the liberal arts in favor of vocationally oriented Stem education. By doing so, we have failed to accomplish the primary goal of education in a democracy: creating citizens capable of the difficult work of self-government. Of course vocational training and Stem education are vital to individual livelihoods and national prosperity. But when they become the sole focus of education, at the expense of the liberal arts, they leave citizens unprepared for the demands of democratic life.The liberal arts derive their name from the Latin ars liberalis, which literally means “the trade skills of a free person”. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, and more importantly their Enlightenment admirers, citizenship was a trade, a vocation that required particular skills, just like any craft. Among the skills a citizen needed were critical thinking, a command of rhetoric and historical literacy. Importantly, historical literacy does not just mean memorizing dates and facts, but the ability to evaluate arguments, weigh interpretations against evidence, and connect past to present.The decline of the humanities has also contributed to the collapse of empathy in American society. Literature and history, in particular, cultivate the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. Of course, empathy can be learned in other ways, but the humanities are uniquely powerful in diverse societies, where civic life depends on the capacity to empathize with those who are profoundly different from ourselves.This is why the Trump administration and its allies have zeroed in on history education. They know what the enemies of free and compassionate societies have always known: people who understand what lies in the pages of history are far harder to oppress and far harder to coax into cruelty.In the place of teaching history, they wish to place propaganda aimed at assuring that the critical thinking, compassion and perspective cultivated by real historical education are denied to America’s students. It is a kind of education American students have been denied for too long, which is why the American public is so vulnerable to this administration’s escalation.Public education in the United States was not initially created to give students “job skills”, as so many on both sides of the political aisle today would have you believe. Teaching the skills necessary for a particular occupation, undeniably essential to economic health, was long viewed as the responsibility of private business and industry, which directly benefited from a trained workforce. Publicly funded schools existed to assure that students would have the skills needed to participate as responsible citizens of the republic. For this reason, the liberal arts, including history, were at the heart of the curriculum.This began to change in the late 1950s, as cold war paranoia fueled a shift in educational priorities towards science, mathematics, technology and engineering aimed at preventing the US from falling behind the Soviet Union in these areas. These subjects, eventually branded Stem, would gain additional traction over the course of the next 60 years as changing economic winds seemed to suggest that career prospects in the rapidly expanding “technology” sector were the best assurance of a stable, if not prosperous, future. The fact that future employment prospects were even a consideration was evidence of another, less often articulated, change that was occurring.Our understanding of education was being shifted to a view in which every part of the curriculum must have an immediate economic utility. It was, whether anyone realized it at the time or not, a dangerous and unconsidered change to the fundamental goals of education that assumed the assurance of economic prosperity required more public attention – and public funding – than the safeguarding of political liberty.It was a gamble that has cost us dearly. The reason that so many of us have become increasingly susceptible to foreign propaganda, “fake news” and just plain bad arguments can be easily explained by the fact that much American curriculum simply fails to teach students how to think critically and deprives them of the important historical and geographic information that would allow them to spot when they are being deceived.One of the great ironies of our era is that the economic benefits of Stem-focused education have proven to be an illusion. It is now clear that within a generation, many non-research based Stem jobs (and plenty of the research-based ones) are likely to simply vanish in the face of AI. And a public without a liberal arts education may simply lack the imagination to work their way out of this radical reordering of the economy. We will have traded our freedom for prosperity and ended up with neither.But it is not too late. Maga’s assault on history can be the line in the sand – the moment we recognize what we have nearly lost. The surest way to defeat the dark forces now gathering in our politics is to make education once again serve its true purpose: preparing citizens for freedom. The liberal arts have always been at the heart of that mission. If we want to remain a free people, we must restore them to their rightful place at the center of American education.

    Katherine Kelaidis is a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England More

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      ‘What’s so controversial about kids learning?’: students compete over history in the face of Trump cuts

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      View image in fullscreenIt only took 10 minutes for the trio of eighth-grade girls to recount the life story of Carol Ruckdeschel, the alligator-wrestling environmental activist sometimes called the “Jane Goodall of sea turtles”.Inside the student union at the University of Maryland, about a 20-minute drive from Washington DC, and armed with papier-mache reptiles, they embarked on a performance that included a litany of costume changes and a pony-tailed rendition of the late president Jimmy Carter, an ally of the 83-year-old Ruckdeschel’s work.When it concluded, the scary part began. A panel of judges peppered the girls with questions.Why did some people consider Ruckdeschel to be controversial?The girls hesitated. “Sorry,” said one, “but what does that word mean?”It was the first day of National History Day (NHD). In its 51st year, the annual US-based competition invites the top middle and high school students from more than half a million competitors to present their projects: documentaries, performances, websites, papers and exhibits on any topic from history, as long it adheres to the year’s theme. The winners get cash prizes and the admiration of their teenage peers.View image in fullscreenThe students come from all over – places like Oregon, Indonesia, North Dakota, Guam, Arkansas and China. Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, competed more than 20 years ago, as did Guy Fieri, whose project on the soft pretzel’s origin helped inspire a future career as a TV star restaurateur.I also competed in NHD, reaching the Florida state competition in 2007 and 2009 with my twin brother. As I reported this year, I joked with students that I’d finally made it to nationals, just 16 years too late. Hardly any of them were even alive then, and the national reality couldn’t have changed more.In April, NHD lost $336,000 after the Trump administration and the “department of government efficiency” slashed funding for the National Endowment of Humanities, putting NHD in jeopardy.“We had so many messages from kids saying, ‘Please, please, please we can’t let History Day go down,’” said Cathy Gorn, NHD executive director since 1995 and “the Taylor Swift of history”, as one student dubbed her last year (to many, there is no greater compliment). On social media she made an impassioned plea for donations. Last-ditch fundraising followed, including contributions from students, like a group from New York that held a bake sale and sent Gorn more than $300 in proceeds.With that, the competition found new legs – for this year, at least. “It’s kids learning,” said Gorn. “What is controversial about that?” And these students want to learn the full history – both its roses and its thorns, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism”.View image in fullscreen“They have no filter,” John Taylor, the NHD state-coordinator from Maine, told me. “They’ll call anyone and ask them anything.”When I competed, the cardinal rule was to abstain from any citing of Wikipedia, a transgression that today seems nostalgically benign. Students now learn to hunt down reputable sources in an era defined by untrustworthy generative AI and revisionist histories. Some students even found that sources they had cited in their research this spring – from governmental websites, no less – had disappeared altogether.“You start to realize that many of them do more research for NHD than you did for your master’s thesis,” Taylor laughed. He told me about a 130-page bibliography a student once turned in: “That thing could have taken down a woodland creature.”These are history-defining times. Do students at NHD see the parallels, the precedence, in their projects? “Oh yeah,” said Gorn, “they get it.”The scene from the student union last Monday could have come straight from a Where’s Waldo book. In one corner, a life-size cutout of George Washington leaned against a wall, until it was scooped up by girls in colonial-era ballgowns. Four lanky boys huddled together, their traffic-cone-orange dress shirts illuminated in the morning light. I heard a boy reading through a script, his manufactured accent undulating between George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and wild west cowboy.In another hallway, lanyarded coordinators carried folders full of research papers and flash drives loaded with digital backups of student-directed documentaries (after a snafu at the state level, one group told me they had brought eight). Nervous students were tailed by teachers and nervous parents with little brothers and sisters in tow, just happy to be along for the ride.View image in fullscreenAs I walked in and out of competition rooms over the next three days, I saw a spectrum of stories that spoke to this year’s competition theme, “Rights and Responsibilities” – the Elgin marbles, birthright citizenship, lobotomies, Martin Luther King Jr, social security, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the first Black character to appear in Charlie Brown. The theme, which sought to magnify the relationship between individuals and society, seemed especially prescient, even though it is one of several that NHD has recycled over the years.At a table finishing up a meal from Chick-fil-A sat Chloe Montgomery, an eighth-grader from Indiana, with her father, Ryan. The topic she chose to research – the Salem witch trials – had been bubbling up for years. “You grow up hearing about the trials a lot,” said Chloe, “like in Hocus Pocus!”Her project had ascended from the local competition in her home town of Mishawaka, through regionals and states, all the way to nationals. Now, father and daughter were in the US capital for the very first time. She, too, was impressed by the spectrum of project topics: “I saw one about Green Day!”In the hallway after the performance about Ruckdeschel, I caught up with the eighth-grade trio. “We’ve had hundreds of sleepovers to work on this!” said Zoe Otis. Not only that, they had traveled from their homes in Knoxville, Tennessee, ferried from mainland Georgia and then biked about 35 miles roundtrip – “half of that was in the dark!” – to meet Ruckdeschel on Cumberland Island, where she lives alone in a cabin.They had spoken with the octogenarian recluse, who still keeps a research lab with jars of turtle guts and bugs. For the girls, it was an eye-opening experience that at times bordered on gut-wrenching. “There was a giant, dead boar on the side of her house,” said Gemma Walker. “She hunts, and eats roadkill.”“We always tell ourselves to ‘embrace the cringe’,” said Addy Aycocke, laughing. This, it turned out, was part of the reason Ruckdeschel was considered controversial, along with her decades-long jousting with the National Park Service and the Carnegie family over environmental protection of the island and its sea turtles.It’s this flavor of research – active, firsthand, hands-dirtying – that history professors at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who started NHD in 1974, saw as the antidote to the traditional textbooks and multiple choice repetition that often went hand in hand with learning history. A science-fair-like competition, they hoped, would propel students to both dig into dusty archives and track down primary accounts – to feel history, rather than to memorize it.View image in fullscreenLater on, I heard stray conversation about Trump’s deployment of the national guard and marines in Los Angeles. Less than 10 miles away, tanks were arriving in Washington for a military parade. “You look at the news, and all you see is negativity,” Gorn told a room of volunteer judges. “But spend a couple of days at National History Day and it’ll give you hope.”It was true. There was an attitude of genuine, mutual encouragement that seems difficult to come by these days. The students seem to understand that nothing is a zero-sum game, that striving for excellence and being amiable with competitors are not mutually exclusive.When I spoke to Gorn a week before, we had discussed the critical role of history, and its sometimes precarious place in the school curriculum.“No Child Left Behind left history education behind,” she said of the 2001 congressional act that, in a quest for equality and accountability in schools, shifted focus to standardized testing and left less time for the humanities. Meanwhile, the national emphasis on Stem subjects could be traced to the National Defense Education Act that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. These subjects are important – she doesn’t argue that – but “not at the expense of history”.“It’s a real disservice to our democracy,” said Colleen Shogan, who works with NHD and was archivist of the United States until February, when she was dismissed by Trump without reason. “We are not teaching kids how the constitution functions and what the principles are that we all agree upon as Americans.”View image in fullscreenThe politicized situations that some history teachers find themselves facing are a marked difference from when Gorn began in education in the 1980s. Disgruntled parents and school boards sometimes seek repercussions if lessons don’t align with their own interpretations of history, often along the lines of race and equity. “I’ve heard many [teachers] say, ‘If I can’t teach complete history, I can’t teach any more,” Gorn said.Not only that, she lamented the attitude that learning the thorny parts of the nation’s past is somehow teaching kids “to hate America”. Not true, she said. “Kids are resilient and they know when you’re pulling it over their eyes.” Young people need to understand that there has been struggle. “That’s how we develop empathy,” she said. “Learning history does that.”It was 6.58pm on Monday, and a crowd had gathered around flat screens throughout the student center. In a few minutes, they would display the list of competition finalists. Students were anxious. Some killed time by doing each other’s hair.At 7pm, several shrieks sounded. A little brother covered his ears and mouthed “Oww!” while student faces split into a telling binary of smiles and frowns. Teachers and parents – quite a respectful bunch when compared with the kind you might find on a suburban soccer field – squinted to read the tiny font. “Maybe that judge wasn’t so bad after all,” said one mother.Three of the smiling students were from Minnesota. Sara Rosenthal and Helen Collins had been selected to move on for their documentary about Radio Free Europe, the American soft-power station begun during the cold war to spread democratic influence to communist countries. Their friend, Jack Grauman, was also advancing. For months, he had researched Frank Kameny for his one-person performance about the astronomer who had been removed from the US army in 1957 for being gay.It was “powerful” to be headed to the finals, Grauman said, and just miles away from Washington, no less, where the current administration is targeting LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, funding for Radio Free Europe is on the Doge chopping block, as are press freedoms around the world. Their teacher told me the girls had to update the ending of their documentary several times to keep up.Even here, students and educators sometimes hesitated before answering my questions. One group of students, from Singapore, was talkative until I asked about their projects’ relevance to today – one was specifically about American borders. In my periphery, I saw their classmates miming the slit-throat gesture, as if to say “don’t answer that one”.Later, I spoke with a group of judges inside the forest of elaborate poster board presentations. One of them kindly declined to go on the record: “I’m a federal worker. I don’t want any attention.”View image in fullscreenBack with the Minnesotans, the outlook was rosy. How would they be celebrating? “We’re going to the dance!”Before leaving campus for the evening, I poked my head into what I’d expected to be an awkward affair. Bass of early 2000s hits – oldies to this crowd – pounded through the walls. I passed two middle-schoolers outside.“It’s weird to talk about your exes to your new boyfriend, you know?”“But I want to know everything!”Inside, hundreds of students were cherishing their success or drowning their relative disappointment with fruit juices and soda. It was a mocktail of hoodies, high heels, recycled homecoming dresses, black-suited vests, and one especially-civic-minded student in a T-shirt that said “Support Local Music”.The trading of pins – each state or country delegation had brought their own – provided much of the necessary social lubrication.And then it was Thursday: results day. Across the hardwood of an indoor arena, delegations marched in like at an Olympic closing ceremony, some carrying flags and inflatable animals and wearing bedazzled top-hats.View image in fullscreenOnce everyone took their seats, Gorn stepped up to the microphone, pumped her hands in the air and roared: “Happy History Day everybody!” Then she teed up a special treat: a congratulatory video from a real-life Thunderbird pilot and NHD alum.Finally, it was time to hear the results. It was a successful day for the Minnesotan contingent. Grauman won a special prize for “equality in history”, climbing the steps to the stage wearing a large smile and a pair of Crocs. Almost two hours of nervous waiting later, Rosenthal and Collins heard their names announced at last – the silver for middle school documentary was theirs. The gold went to a pair of students from Chiang Mai, Thailand, for their look into the UK miners’ strike of 1984.If funding comes through, next year’s NHD theme – “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History” – will again seem especially relevant. If there was a silver lining to the uncertainty, Gorn said, it was that students felt how a decision made far away in the nation’s capital could directly affect them.As Vritti Udasi, a high schooler from Florida, told me: “The place where we are today didn’t come out of thin air. If we study history, dissect it, then we can progress.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

      by

      In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south.Visitors have come in their millions to the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s biggest museum, education and research complex, in Washington for the past 178 years. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural wrecking ball.The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “While the Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past, it has not been directly attacked in quite this way by the executive branch in its long history. It’s troubling and quite scary.”View image in fullscreenThe Smithsonian was conceived in the 19th century by the British scientist James Smithson, who, despite never setting foot in the US, bequeathed his estate for the purpose of a Washington-based establishment that would help with “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. In 1846, 17 years after Smithson’s death, then president James Polk signed legislation calling for the institution’s formation.The Smithsonian now spans 21 museums, most of them in the nation’s capital lining the national mall from the US Capitol to the Washington monument, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The National Portrait Gallery, which displays a photo of Trump in its presidents gallery, is in downtown Washington.The Smithsonian also encompasses the National Zoo, famed for its giant pandas, and 14 education and research centres employing thousands of scientists and scholars and offering various programmes for schools.Visitors to the National Museum of Natural History’s FossiLab can see paleobiologists chipping away at rock to uncover bones buried for hundreds of millions of years. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory played a key role in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019.View image in fullscreenAbout 60% of the Smithsonian’s funding comes from the federal government, but trust funds and private sources also provide money.The institution has known its share of controversies. In 1995, the air and space museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with accompanying text that critics complained was more sympathetic to Japan than the US. The exhibition was cancelled and the plane put on display with no interpretation.Trump visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture a month after taking office in 2017. His reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was: “You know, they love me in the Netherlands,” according to the museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, who subsequently became the first Black person to lead the Smithsonian.Trump paid little attention to the institution during the rest of his first term, although in 2019 his vice-president, Mike Pence, took part in the unveiling of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the air and space museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.View image in fullscreenAs in so many other ways, however, Trump’s second term is a whole different beast. The president believes there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”, according to the White House executive order.He argues this “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light”. The order also asserts: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”It cherrypicks examples, arguing that the African American museum “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘white culture’”. This refers to content that was on the museum’s website in 2020 and later removed after criticism.The order points to the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which states that societies including the US have used race to establish systems of power and that “race is a human invention”.It criticises a planned women’s museum for “celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports” and aims to ensure the museum does not “recognize men as women in any respect”.The order stipulates that the vice-president, JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents, work with Congress and the office of management and budget to block programmes that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy”. It calls for new citizen members “committed to advancing the policy of this order”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll of this is in line with his administration’s efforts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in government, universities and corporations. The Smithsonian shut its diversity office soon after the president signed a January executive order banning DEI programmes at organisations that receive federal money.It is also of a piece with Trump’s longstanding demand for “patriotic” education. In February, he issued an executive order re-establishing his 1776 Commission, which was a riposte to the New York Times newspaper’s 1619 Project – and he has been a strident critic of renaming or removing Confederate statues and monuments.The order bears the hallmark of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which created the influential Project 2025. The thinktank’s website has an article that describes the 1619 project as “yet another attempt to brainwash you into believing your country is racist, evil and needs revolutionary transformation”. Another warns that the Smithsonian’s proposed Latino museum would be “a woke indoctrination factory”.But progressives say the cultural clampdown will only sow further discord. Tope Folarin, a Nigerian American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said in an email: “You cannot ‘foster unity’ by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides.“These museums are important because they tell the full American story in an unvarnished way. We will only achieve unity when we are able to reckon with the truth about how this country was founded, and acknowledge the heroes who worked continuously to bring us together.”On Friday, the mood at the Smithsonian, which has long enjoyed positive relations with both Democratic and Republican administrations, was rife with uncertainty. Many had been bracing for this moment, but it remained unclear what impact the order will have on staffing levels or current and future exhibitions, including plans to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence.David Blight, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian’s secretary, said: “I haven’t talked to him yet. I’m sure he’s trying to decide what to do. I hope he doesn’t resign but that’s probably what they want. They want the leadership of the Smithsonian, the directors of these museums, to resign so they can replace them.”Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was “appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised”, when he read the executive order. “There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,” he said. “I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.”The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.“I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It’s a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we’ve been writing for a century.”Trump’s previous cultural targets have included the Kennedy Center and Institute of Museum and Library Services. This week he urged congressional Republicans to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He has also threatened to cut funding to universities refusing to bend the knee.Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried never to have.”The sentiment was echoed by Raymond Arsenault, a professor of southern history at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. He said: “What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.He added: “It’s so chilling. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.”Arsenault, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American museum, said the late congressmen would be “shocked” by Trump’s order: “It’s totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.” More

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      Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’

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      Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order on Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”.The president said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.He signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.Trump’s order specifically names the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s history museum, which is in development.“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order said.Representatives for the Smithsonian did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It consists of 21 museums and the National Zoo. Eleven museums are located along the National Mall in Washington.The institution was established with funds from James Smithson, a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to found “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”.On Thursday, Trump also created the “DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force” by executive order. It will be chaired by Stephen Miller, the US homeland security adviser.According to the order, the task force will coordinate with local officials on such things as enforcing federal immigration law, including deporting people living illegally in the city, boost the law enforcement presence, and increase the speed and lower the cost of processing applications to carry concealed weapons.The order also calls for removing graffiti and taking other steps to beautify the city.Trump has talked often about his desire to make the city safer and prettier. More

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      The American civil war ended on this day. It should be a national holiday | Steve Phillips

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      April 9 should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces – marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multi-racial democracy, the country’s leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step.Boiled down to its essence, the civil war began because the presidential candidate sympathetic to African Americans, Abraham Lincoln, won the election of 1860, and the losing side refused to accept the election results (sound familiar?). That defiance of democracy led to eleven states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederacy, which was founded, in the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”. The civil war was a truly existential conflict that raged for four years of killing and carnage that resulted in the deaths of 2% of the country’s residents – the equivalent of 7 million people, based on today’s population.April 9 not only recalls the defeat of the white supremacists, but the beginning of the first faltering steps towards making the country a multi-racial democracy. During Reconstruction, laws were passed, land divided, and institutions created to foster education and public health for people of all racial backgrounds. In the words of the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, “the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see”.One would think that such a landmark achievement would be annually remembered, recognized and cherished. But one would be wrong. It is in fact the Confederates and their ideological and genealogical heirs who regularly nurture the memories of those who fought for legalized white supremacy within our borders.Organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans promoted and defended the creation of hundreds of monuments to Confederate leaders across the country and continue to do so to this day. (You can buy shot glasses, belt buckles and bars of soap honoring Confederate heroes online.) Hollywood showered huge sums of money on creating films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind that sanitized mass murder and human bondage. To this day, Texas offers a paid holiday to state employees so that they can celebrate Confederate Heroes Day and honor the white supremacists Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee.For the health of our democracy, the education of our children, and the elevation of the vision and values that this is a nation where people of all racial backgrounds are cherished, we should launch a movement from coast to coast to make April 9 a holiday.There is a reason that the rallying cry about the Holocaust is “Never Forget.” People around the world recognize the importance of preserving the memory of one of the great atrocities in the history of humanity so that it doesn’t occur again. Nazism is predicated on the same kinds of white supremacist beliefs that precipitated the civil war, and an institutionalized reminder of the threat and defeat of that threat will help create guardrails to defend the democracy in the future.Modern-day Confederates are well aware of the importance of what children are taught about this country’s racial history and contemporary realities. That is why leaders in former slave-holding states such as Florida, Virginia, and Texas have passed legislation and taken aggressive action to whitewash their curricula through attacks on so-called Critical Race Theory.Public support for racial justice requires an understanding and appreciation of the persistence and prevalence of racial injustice. Formalizing the recognition of what the civil war was, which side won, and where we currently stand will deepen young people’s understanding and commitment to continuing the vigilance needed to foster racial justice and equality.As much as the holiday itself, the debate over establishing it will educate the country and affirm our values. We don’t have to wait for a divided Congress to act. School boards, city councils, boards of supervisors, and state legislatures can all pass resolutions marking the occasion and declaring a local holiday, thereby creating momentum for a federal holiday. And introducing a bill in Congress will force members to go on record, creating a basis for ads and campaign materials challenging voters to choose a side between white nationalism and multi-racial democracy.The only reason not to proceed is lack of courage – and bad math skills. The ideological descendants of the Confederacy will get mad, no question; but they are not the majority. Forcing people to choose will reveal that the majority want a multi-racial democracy, and if that is in fact the case let’s set aside the 9th of April as a day of national celebration.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      Make Sense of the Old and New Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation

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      ReviewMyth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsenseThis collection of essays by 21 exceptional historians has an ambitious mission: the re-education of Americans assaulted by lies more systematically than any previous generation.‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Read moreThe editors are two Princeton history professors, Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer. They begin with a concise history of how we reached this zenith of misinformation.The assault on truth by a right-wing “media ecosystem” began with Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News, augmented in recent years by even more fantasy-based cable networks like Newsmax and One America News.The shamelessness of these sham journalists was best summarized by lawyers defending the most successful one, Tucker Carlson, in a suit accusing him of slander. The preppy anchor’s statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts”, they said, because he so obviously engages in “non-literal commentary”.Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack right-wing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just desserts.”A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Written by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”.Goldwater was crushed by Johnson but as well as his native Arizona, he carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.There is a great deal more surprising, fact-based history in these 390 pages. In an era notorious for an attention span demolished by the internet, it is buoying indeed that a volume of this seriousness has spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
      Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past is published in the US by Basic Books
      TopicsBooksHistory booksUS politicsUS educationHistoryreviewsReuse this content More

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      Revolution Erupted in Iran Because of Mohammad Reza Shah

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Dirty Secrets About How Reza Shah Destroyed Iran

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More