The current presidential administration has been making history.
I don’t mean making history the way that phrase is typically used. I mean the Trump administration has been making history up, by erasing facts that don’t meet the administration’s standards for political correctness. The erasures have taken place in several formats, including on federal websites, in federal training materials, etc. The American Historical Assoc. and the Organization of American Historians have issued a “Statement Condemning Federal Censorship of American History”; I’ll include the full statement below.
A few of the changes have been stopped by public protests, such as removing the Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force training videos. The Air Force removed the Tuskegee Airmen from the videos because they intepreted Trump’s executive orders against DEI as applying to any mention of the history of a Black combat unit. Given the wording of the executive order, I feel the Air Force made a reasonable interpretation of the order, i.e., the fault lies not with the Air Force but with the executive order.
Other changes to American history remain in place. For example, as of right now the home page of the Stonewall National Monument doesn’t contain the word “transgender,” and the the acronym “LGBTQ” has been replaced by the acronym “LGB.” (The Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows that the acronym “LGBT” was used prior to the Trump administration executive orders; see e.g. this archived webpage from 2022.) Since trans people were integral to the Stonewall riots, the simple removal of the “T” from “LGBTQ” does in fact represent a major rewriting of history by the federal government. The Trump administration may not like transgender people, but like them or not, they were most definitely a part of the history of the Stonewall riots.
I see several things going on here. First, while the Trump administration and their allies denounce “cancel culture,” this looks like cancel culture to me. Second, while the Trump administration and allies denounce censorship, this looks like censorship to me. And finally, as I said at the beginning of this post, this is political correctness — which the Trump administration and their allies have also denounced.
No surprises here. The Trumpites are not the first politicians to spin stories that have little relationship to facts, but which help to bolster their agendas. But it seems like a good idea to document the amazingly vast extent to which the Trump administration is just — making stuff up.
Statement Condemning Federal Censorship of American History
from the Organization of American Historians, 13 March 2025
The American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) condemn recent efforts to censor historical content on federal government websites, at many public museums, and across a wide swath of government resources that include essential data. New policies that purge words, phrases, and content that some officials deem suspect on ideological grounds constitute a systemic campaign to distort, manipulate, and erase significant parts of the historical record. Recent directives insidiously prioritize narrow ideology over historical research, historical accuracy, and the actual experiences of Americans.
As the institution chartered by the US Congress for “the promotion of historical studies” and “in the interest of American history, and of history in America,” the American Historical Association must speak out when the nation’s leadership wreaks havoc with that history. So, too, must the OAH, as the organization committed to promoting “excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history.” It is bad enough to forget the past; it is even worse to intentionally deny the public access to what we remember, have documented, and have expended public resources to disseminate.
At this writing, the full range of historical distortions and deletions is yet to be discerned. Federal entities and institutions subject to federal oversight and funding are hastily implementing revisions to their resources in an attempt to comply with the “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and executive orders such as “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” These changes range from scrubbing words and acronyms from websites to papering over interpretive panels in museums. Some alterations, such as those related to topics like the Tuskegee Airmen and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been hurriedly reversed in response to public outcry. Others remain. The scrubbing of words and acronyms from the Stonewall National Monument webpage, for instance, distorts the site’s history by denying the roles of transgender and queer people in movements for rights and liberation. This distortion of history renders the past unrecognizable to the people who lived it and useless to those who seek to learn from the past.
It remains unclear whether federal agencies are preserving the original versions of these materials for future reference or research. Articles written by historians for the National Park Service, for example, have been altered, and in some instances deleted, because they examine history with references to gender or sexuality. These revisions were made without the authors’ knowledge or consent, and without public acknowledgment that the original articles had been revised. The AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct is clear: “Honoring the historical record also means leaving a clear trail for subsequent historians to follow. Any changes to a primary source or published secondary work, whether digital or print, should be noted.”
Words matter. Precision matters. Context matters. Expertise matters. Democracy matters. We can neither deny what happened nor invent things that did not happen. Recent executive orders and other federal directives alter the public record in ways that are contrary to historical evidence. They result in deceitful narratives of the past that violate the professional standards of our discipline. When government entities, or scholars themselves, censor the use of particular words, they in effect censor historical evidence. Censorship and distortion erase people and institutions from history.
The AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct makes clear that historians can neither misrepresent their sources nor omit evidence because it “runs counter” to their interpretations. The OAH and AHA condemn the rejection of these professional standards. Classifying collective historical scholarship as “toxic indoctrination” or “discriminatory equity ideology” dismisses the knowledge generated by the deep research of generations of historians. It violates the training, expertise, and purposes of historians as well as their responsibility to public audiences.
Our professional ethics require that “all historians believe in honoring the integrity of the historical record.” We expect our nation’s leadership to adhere to this same basic standard and we will continue to monitor, protest, and place in the historical record any censorship of American historical facts.