blight David Yale hist
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the primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.
On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.
We have opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.
Public and political resistance to historians is nothing new; book bans, fights over textbooks and curricula, and battles over what a proper national narrative should be have long besieged our craft. Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!
:{:{In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:}:
One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery;
five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy;
six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes;
seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.
All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.}:
In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.
These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. }:}:
All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. The White House/Heritage Foundation axis has seized the word “patriotic,” as its cloak of legitimacy, and all who care about a pluralistic, meaningful American history must seize it right back. Their initial threats to the Smithsonian, indeed, according to Mike Gonzalez, one of their attack artists, is only the beginning of a long war some within the Heritage Foundation intend to wage until they can depose Lonnie Bunch as the institution’s secretary.}:
The Heritage Foundation has been an incubator of much of Trumpism in style and content. Indeed, if Trumpism is a grandiose media show, Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump’s history department, ready and eager to tell you what to think about the nation’s past.
On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Roberts leads an organization with hundreds of employees, $100 million on hand in 2023, and support from several extraordinarily wealthy conservative foundations. For more than 50 years, Heritage’s leadership has dreamed of this moment: a presidential administration willing to destroy and then remake the nation’s “heritage” in the service of right-wing triumphalism and now, via Roberts, Christian nationalism. Roberts has a Ph.D. in American history but has come to loathe the universities that bred him. His dissertation, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831,” is a study of kinfolk and family patterns in the lives of Black people in his home state (he grew up in Lafayette, raised by a single mother after divorce). For this work, he drew upon the revolution in late-twentieth-century scholarship on the social and cultural history of the lives of the enslaved.
:{:{Not so his more recent political fare. On the eve of the 2024 election, Roberts published the book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,with a foreword by then-Senator JD Vance. Roberts’s original title advocated “burning down” Washington and remaking it in the image of Christian nationalism. His stock-in-trade consists of vacuous platitudes that emerge from well-rehearsed sound bites. He wants “national renewal” forged “just as it was under Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln’s presidency encompassed four years of all-out Civil War, during which he managed an extraordinary expansion of federal government power in order to defeat the Confederacy. }:
He also signed legislation for an income tax and a new finance system to pay for the war; the Homestead Act to provide land for poor farmers; the Morrill Act to found land grant colleges across the nation; and the Pacific Railway Act, which authorized the first transcontinental railroad. Above all, Lincoln used unprecedented executive power to free the slaves and confiscate around $3.5 billion of legal property (worth around $119 billion today). National renewal indeed. With the presumed exception of emancipation, Roberts would denounce all of them, or their equivalents, today.}:
In a June 2025 essay, “America’s Golden Age: A Return to Permanent Things,” Roberts argues that liberalism has created a nation in which “liberty could survive without virtue.” Roberts seems to know nothing about the liberals who love teaching in great books programs rooted in classical works of all kinds. Moreover, Roberts loves lists of big ideas lined up like stations of the cross that can only be observed uncritically. Lincoln’s era was “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-God, pro-nation.” Somewhere in historical heaven, Lincoln ruefully chuckles at how today’s Republicans misuse his legacy of expanding government. The “permanent things” Roberts demands are “Faith. Family. Work. Worship. Sovereignty. Sacrifice.” I do not know any liberals who oppose those values and practices. Roberts has long since abandoned any responsibility to define his terms. He imagines a return historically to a political order defined by the Whigs, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay, without ever saying why.
Liberal academics have become “tyrants who shroud themselves in ‘academic freedom,’” Roberts blithely asserts. Well, liberals in universities in some quarters do have much to answer for in our hubris and our obfuscations that have made us easy targets for these assaults. In Roberts’s vision, though, liberals are little more than godless, cultural elitists who do not believe in anything permanent or any kind of truth. Such an absurd claim might apply to a few postmodernists steeped in the academic fashions of the ’80s or ’90s, but no one has condemned the products of that arcane theoretical persuasion quite as much as serious “liberal” research historians. Projection fuels Roberts’s passion, and slogans drive his prose. “Our rights come not from courts or constitutions, but from God,” he proclaims. One wonders how the United States would have survived this long if every lawyer in a courtroom arguing a Fourteenth Amendment case would make that argument before a federal judge.
:{:{Roberts constantly announces that America lacks the search for “meaning.” But what on Earth does he mean when he says: “liberty without order is chaos, and … without truth, even freedom becomes a mask for slavery”? Roberts’s “Golden Age” is one derived from “natural law and biblical wisdom.” Great! No one in the nineteenth century embodied those intellectual and spiritual traditions as much as the famed abolitionist and liberal political thinker, Frederick Douglass. }:
So, since Roberts does not seek any “moderation” with liberals and prefers to “bury” them, I respectfully invite him to join a small group of historians in a series of discussions/debates. He can choose his companions, and we will choose our participants. I challenge him to a series of civil debates in major television or podcast outlets, or especially a public venue before the 2026 anniversary of American independence. What are and ought to be the big questions and answers about American history at this important marker in time? Roberts says he wishes to “catechize our children better than the culture indoctrinates them.” He says he wants to “outbuild” liberalism, “in education, in media, in law, and in the public square.” Then please come join us in the public square, and, as you continue to declare war on us, let’s try to have a civil discussion among historians before it is too late. We eagerly await your response.}:
Many great voices, living and dead, have called on us to engage this debate. In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the writer Toni Morrison, in a moment less harrowing than now, warned about the threats made by people in power to how we think, write, and teach. Beware, she asserted, of “statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” Prophetically, she pressed on. “However moribund, it [statist control of thought] is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.}:
Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story.” Such language, Morrison argued, exists “to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege.” She summoned us to wake up to these assaults on how we know the past. “Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability.” This was 1993, in the hopeful wake of the end of the Cold War! “When language” about truth and history “dies,” said Morrison, “all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” Do not commit “tongue-suicide,” she demanded, in fear of “infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of the human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.”}:
With Morrison’s call to duty more than 30 years ago, we cannot drop the baton of today. We are all “accountable,” Mr. Roberts. All of us. Your fellow historians invite you to the public square.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
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https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/yale-history-professor-torches-trump-s-political-war-on-american-history-244558405971
mSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian, and Yale University professor David Blight who is calling out Donald Trump's attacks on the facts of U.S. history and the flawed scholarship of Kevin Roberts of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, who is behind Project 2025 that is seemingly guiding many of the Trump administration's actions.
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tnr
Under the grossly misleading title “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the White House last week issued an executive order that would undermine the integrity of writing and teaching of American history. The order uses ideological litmus tests to define for teachers and students what is acceptable and unacceptable American history. Historians, and all who teach and care about the American past at historic sites, in museums, libraries, publishing, and in social studies and history classrooms should loudly protest this incursion into our schools, our writing, and our minds.
This attempt to censor and restrict the teaching of multiple important topics in U.S. history comes as efforts are ongoing in Washington to cut or ban myriad federal programs and agencies.
Instilling fear is the point of the administration’s assault on history education, as it is also the point of thought control in George Orwell’s 1984. There the protagonist, Winston Smith, finds a “fragment of the abolished past”: a newspaper clipping containing a photograph of former Party leaders proving that their “confessions” for a crime were a lie. He had once hoped this clipping would prove that Big Brother had destroyed accurate but unacceptable history by erasing or altering any information that did not fit his narrative.
But it did not, and later, when he looks at a children’s history book with a picture of Big Brother as the frontispiece, Winston begins to question everything he believed and wonders if the Party might actually be right, even about things that seem obviously false. What if “two and two made five”? “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” utters Winston. “It was their final, most essential command.”
As historians and educators, however, we still have our voices and, like Winston, we must shout: “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center.” And we must do this now before it is too late.
History is a reasoned reconstruction of the past, rooted in the deepest evidence we can find, crafted into narratives that inform, educate, and sometimes inspire. History can indeed be influenced by ideological assumptions—they can be argument-driven—but those are the assumptions and tendencies that historians test and control through training in research, in critical thinking, in humility, in respect for sources, in an ethics about documentation, and in the integrity of debate. All this is true of history educators and scholars, and the public’s trust is our ultimate goal, even authority.
The “Ending Radical Indoctrination” executive order is an attempt to undermine that authority in the interest of a manufactured national unity. It violates every instinct, every principle, indeed nearly every method of research and thinking that historians have practiced for at least a century.
Historians often disagree on interpretations, on how much evidence is enough, and on which explanations of the past are most compelling. But we do often reach consensuses on the range of likely possibilities. Our adherence to professional standards allows even those who disagree with one another to help young people understand their country in our books, documentary films, and museum and historic site exhibitions. What our profession most definitely does not believe is that the primary purpose of history is to instill a single notion of “patriotic education” in our youth about “our incredible Nation,” as the order demands.
Humility is not the order of business in Washington just now, nor is factual accuracy. This order audaciously defines “patriotic education” as a history grounded in “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” Lovely words. Yet many of those ennobled, indeed brilliant, Founders would be astonished to see themselves portrayed as utterly unified during the creation of the Constitution, its ratification, and during the turbulent early republic.
Similarly, the order’s assertion that children are being indoctrinated in classrooms and that “parents” generally want their children educated to this narrow patriotic standard is clearly belied by the evidence. Data from a recent survey undertaken by the American Historical Association indicates that people need and desire good, critical history, especially as a buoy in our polarized political culture. Millions of Americans crave reading high-quality, challenging history and biography, especially when it gives them new perspectives and helps them grasp an often troubling and divisive present.
Intended to instill fear in teachers, this order itself ironically seems driven by fear, by a refusal to acknowledge the diversity of our nation and the wounds that cannot be healed until they are understood. And laced throughout is an obsession with sexuality and a moral panic about “gender equity” education. The order prohibits education about “social transition.” The authors seem to want schools and universities to cease to write and teach about gender altogether, a field more than a half-century old and flourishing. They seem confident that if they could just succeed in this particular kind of abolition, along with that of any efforts to trace the history of racism (systemic or otherwise), then American youth could somehow feel unified, confident, and as unperturbed by conflict and suffering elsewhere in the world as they are unaware of such aspects of our nation’s past.
In the imagined era of American virtue at the heart of the executive order, the politicized Supreme Court might be trusted again, violent and lawless people would not be pardoned, Native Americans and their historians might stop reminding us of a bloody past we find it difficult to face. And environmental degradation in the past will no longer sully our unified present. Given how the order requires the Department of Education to fund the revival of the 1776 Commission to plan the “celebration” of America’s 250th anniversary, the Department of Defense to engineer history programs, and the National Park Service to be complicitous in often vacuous patriotic public history programs, should we begin now to gut the most interesting exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American History or at the National Portrait Gallery?
Using the order’s twisted logic, should we consider a complete revision or abolition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture? Its massive audiences have clearly not learned sufficient love of country from visiting those divisive halls. Should we plan to tear down the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that bears witness to a war that tore America apart and thereby protect our youth from such knowledge? What will we do with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial or the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and their immortal words carved in stone from truly conflicted pasts that we collectively, mostly survived? The Lincoln Memorial would have to scrub its reference to “every drop of blood drawn by the lash,” not to mention “this mighty scourge of [Civil] war,” whose legacies still haunt us.
But the threats to history do not stop there. Could many of our most prominent history centers and museums be scrutinized for their devotion to “accurate, honest,” and “unifying” history as narrowly defined by the order? Will this administration revisit the National Park Service’s thoughtful and informed approaches to American history? Will it shut down the more than 20 Civil War battlefield sites, visited by thousands, since those visitors may learn something about how slavery destroyed the republic and ushered in a brutal, divisive memory embedded in how Americans have sought to reconcile that war?
Historians differ in our understandings of the past. We do not differ in our commitment to evidence or the integrity of our discipline. We urge our colleagues and all citizens committed to democracy to speak out against those who truly seek indoctrination, to advocate for good history. Our society has never needed us quite as much as now.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Beth English is the executive director of the Organization of American Historians.
James Grossman is the former executive director of the American Historical Association.
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