The Organization of American Historians has just issued a report detailing the new Administration’s attempts to distort history to place it in line with Donald Trump’s order to restore “sanity” in the teaching of history. The report was published by the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) set up by the OAH.
Introduction
This report has been prepared by the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP), an advocacy group founded in February 2025. Coordinated by the Organization of
American Historians, its mission is to advocate for the integrity of historical records and interpretation in the public interest. HARPP is a collective of professional historians and allies that
monitors, documents, and counters efforts to erase, distort, or limit access to the public presentation of history and public records, undermine public-serving historical and cultural institutions,
and threaten historical accuracy and other professional standards.
Since last February, HARPP has been collecting information about the many ways that the current administration and other governmental and non-governmental actors are attempting to undercut, censor, and distort American history. The following document is a report of our findings,
drafted originally as a backgrounder for the “History Under Fire” workshop scheduled for April
19, 2026, at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in Philadelphia.
We subsequently revised the draft based on what we learned during and after the conference.
Our goal is to create a record of the damage done thus far and provide a resource for reversing
and remedying that damage in the future. This report is not offered as a definitive or complete
survey. Many different groups are doing this important work, and HARPP members have benefitted from their efforts to defend historical documentation and evidence-based analysis. We share
this report in the hopes of making future efforts of this kind more comprehensive and inclusive.
On January 21, 2025, when Donald J. Trump returned to the White House for his second term,
few Americans anticipated just how far-reaching the impacts would be on our ways and means
of exploring America’s history. Since then, the new administration and its allies have executed a
far-reaching assault on American history. By “American history” we mean not so much the past
itself as the ways that past has been recorded, preserved, remembered, and told.
The second Trump administration’s assault ranges across many dimensions of American history: from historical accounts and narratives to the institutions and individuals working to preserve
historical documents, data, records, and places; research and teach history; and communicate
with broad and diverse American publics. This coordinated campaign of disinformation has relied on an extraordinary panoply of means available to leaders of the executive branch. Trump
and his supporters have used their levers of power and “bully pulpits” to attack historical scholarship, attempt to undermine professional norms, and threaten governmental and non-governmental institutions, including colleges, universities, archives, libraries, and museums. The campaign encompasses cuts in appropriations and staffing; the arbitrary termination of grants and
other support; efforts to redirect funds through politicized processes; the scrubbing of websites,
museums, and historic sites; and the commandeering of planning for the commemoration of
the nation’s 250th birthday, all to promote narrowly ideological and propagandistic versions of
American history.
After more than a year in which the second Trump administration and its allies have sought to
“flood the zone” in the realm of American history, we as historians need to document this campaign to destroy and distort the substance, infrastructure, and work of American history. As we
argue here, the assault has come from the top down, starting with the White House, but it has
done so in coordination with movements, organizations, and individuals deeply critical of the democratization of historical methods and topics. We have grouped these efforts into three broad
categories:
1. Censorship and erasure: The war on history seeks to suppress the commitments of historians within and beyond the federal government to understand the problems and challenges our nation has faced throughout its history and to honestly reckon with these through
research, evidence, and analysis. One major goal of these efforts is to write the majority
of the nation’s peoples out of American history, returning us to elitist and anti-democratic
historical methods, practices, and interpretations.
2. Attacks on institutions: The war on history’s attacks on government agencies and educational institutions have sought to limit the preservation of historical records, reduce
access to historical materials, damage places where the public goes to learn about American history, malign and defame historians and specialists in related fields, and curb or
redirect public funding streams for historical work. All of this poses the threat of dumbing
down historical understanding in ways that are consonant with other assaults on expertise, research, scholarship, science, and evidence-based knowledge.
3. Compelling “patriotic” history: The war on history seeks to warp our national past in ways
unbefitting a democracy, resembling more the indoctrinating propaganda of authoritarian states. By commanding versions of American history that are exclusively celebratory
and uncritical, and that revolve around individual “heroes” who are overwhelmingly white,
straight, wealthy, Christian, and male, it threatens to reverse decades of advances in the
democratization of history.
Taken together these efforts aim to silence histories that have made our understanding of the
American past far more democratic and inclusive in recent decades.
Background
While much of this report concentrates on the recent actions of federal government agencies
and offices, our training as historians leads us to emphasize that these actions have deeper historical roots and are inspired, aided, and abetted by a broader set of networks, structures, and
systems.
In the United States as elsewhere, reactionary conservatism has long leaned hard on history,
invoking golden ages, rosy pasts, and longstanding traditions as grounds for bemoaning recent and current developments. A recent essay by Alexander Jacobs describes the “animating
idea” of modern conservatism as “‘imperiled nobility’…, that modernity’s churn threatens the best
things (institutions, ideals, practices, personalities, etc.) in our world with extinction, and that we
must act to preserve and protect them.” This in turn is related to the “Great Replacement Theory,” the notion that white people are at risk of being replaced by “others.” These are important
contexts for the recent wave of attacks on so-called “woke” history, which is falsely accused of
conspiring to erase wealthy Christian white men and their greatness from history.1
The field of American history has long included practitioners interested in the experiences of the
marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the disempowered, but beginning in the middle decades of the twentieth century, understandings of American history underwent a tidal shift. Influenced
by Cold War struggles, global decolonization campaigns, and new social movements, professional historians, social studies teachers, community-based scholars, and historians affiliated
with archives, libraries, and museums participated in the broad-based democratization of American history. This encompassed the diversification of the topics considered worthy of historical
study, the people who participated in historical knowledge production, and the publics that were
moved and inspired by history.
For all their variety, these new perspectives had much in common. Instead of focusing mostly or
exclusively on the lives and actions of economic, intellectual, military, and political elites, and the
“great events” associated with them, more and more historians affirmed the importance of ordinary Americans and everyday experiences. History “from below” or “from the bottom up” successfully complicated our understanding of American history by democratizing it and by forcing
historians to reckon with histories of discrimination, hatred, inequality, injustice, oppression, and
violence in ways they had not before. In turn, this led many historians to explore everyday resistance, movement activism, political struggle, and individual agency, all of which deepened the
study of American history and broadened the public audiences interested in the field. Just a few
generations ago, most historical scholarship ignored and marginalized immigrants, Indigenous
people, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people with disabilities, religious minorities, women,
and workers. Today that is no longer the case.
Over the same period, a conservative countermovement also gathered steam, extolling the virtues of a past world imagined as better than what “the present” offered. This imagined past,
which may be conceptualized as a new “lost cause,” was a Christian, expansionist, heteronormative, and patriarchal nation with “free” markets, “small” governments, and powerful militaries.
Indeed, key conservative organizational names hearken back to this imagined past, with high
profile examples including Heritage Foundation, founded in 1972, and the Federalist Society, established in 1982. Interestingly, however, by the time this countermovement gained unprecedented power within the federal government in 2025, its actions were evidence for the assertion that
it no longer was oriented to “conserving” the past. Rather, as evident in the approaches taken to
American history by the federal government’s executive and judicial branches since the start of
President’s Trump’s second term, its focus was on the delegitimization, removal, and wrecking
of decades of historical scholarship and public history , and the active suppression of anything
that complicated a singular, mythologized national narrative. In many respects, these approaches have been radical and revolutionary rather than conservative in refusing to conserve, defend,
preserve, and protect history. In the pages that follow, we document the implementation of these
approaches over the last eighteen months…
Censorship and Erasure
Executive Orders
Executive Orders have been the mechanism of choice for President Trump and his administration to steer the assault on American history. At the outset, it should be noted that there is a pattern of attaching inflammatory labels to the executive orders that hide their intent, misrepresent
their reach, and malign historical practitioners. For example:
Executive Order 14253: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History (Mar. 27,
2025).2
This order mandated review of historical interpretation and exhibits in federal cultural institutions (most notably the Smithsonian Institution); tasked Vice President Vance and Interior Secretary Burgum with reviewing monuments, memorials, statues, or markers for content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans” and recommending revisions across National Park Service
locations; and directed the reinstatement of monuments removed since 2020 for “ideological”
reasons. EO 14253 has encouraged censorship and damaged historical interpretation at multiple sites, including Independence National Historical Park, Lowell National Historical Park, Manzanar and Minidoka National Historic Sites, Muir Woods National Monument, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Stonewall National Monument. More than 1,000 items at NPS sites have been flagged for review or removal.3 (For more on how this order has been
applied, see the sections below on the Smithsonian and the National Park Service.)
In defining what “truth” and “sanity” are to be restored, the order tells a story about trends in the
writing of American history that is an utter fabrication. Ten years ago, it asserts, “our nation’s
history” was based on facts, but over the past decade “Americans have witnessed a concerted
and widespread effort” to “replac[e] objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” Marshalling this binary with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the order
chiefly targets “divisive race-centered ideologies”—that is, histories focused on, or critical of, the
nation’s understandings of race and its mistreatment of people of color. Here and elsewhere,
there are similar attacks on environmental history, gender history, the history of sexuality, and
Indigenous history. The only explicit criterion it offers for arbitrating the truth of any claim about
American history is whether it supports a rigid and formulaic narrative: showing “our Nation’s
unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” In an Orwellian
turn of phrase, this standard is presented as truth, not ideology.
Professional associations of historians skewered EO 14253. “This is not a return to sanity,” argued the Organization of American Historians (OAH). “Rather, it sanitizes to destroy truth,” “rewrit[ing] history to reflect a glorified narrative that downplays or disappears elements of America’s history—slavery, segregation, discrimination, division—while suppressing the voices of
historically excluded groups.”4
Nor was the campaign to erase and censor confined to historical questions about race and slavery; the administration also demonstrated an obsession with what it termed “gender ideology.”
This began with an executive order that rejected decades of scholarship in the natural sciences,
social sciences, humanities, and history:
Executive Order 14168: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and
Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025). See also Executive Order 14201: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports (Feb. 5, 2025).5
EO 14168 announced a new policy recognizing two and only two sexes, male and female,
“grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality” and referring to “an individual’s immutable
classification as either male or female.” Presenting itself as non-ideological, this order sought
to impose an outdated ideology that has been challenged by countless studies of gender and
sexual diversity, in and beyond the United States, and countless historical studies that have documented and interpreted change over time in conceptions and experiences of sex, gender, and
sexuality.6 EO 14168 and related actions by the federal government have had negative impacts
on trans, intersex, and non-binary historians and history students; on historians who teach about
gender and sexuality; on feminist, gender, LGBTQ+, sexuality, and women’s studies courses and
programs; and on the teaching of women’s history, gender history, the history of sexuality, and
LGBTQ+ history. (For more on how this order came to be applied, see the sections below on the
Smithsonian and the National Park Service.)
Executive Order 14190: Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling (Jan. 29,
2025).7
Other executive orders applied similar arguments to call for censorship of the history taught
throughout our educational system. Executive Order 14190 rejected what it termed the “indoctrination” of children with what it labeled “radical, anti-American ideologies,” notwithstanding its
own support for indoctrination and its arguably radically anti-American comments about multiple American cultures and communities. It withheld federal funding from schools that violate
anti-discrimination laws, a laudable goal, but defined these to include schools that “treat individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups.” Federal funds also would be withheld
from schools that teach that “members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally or
inherently superior;” “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin,
is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive” or “should be discriminated against or receive adverse
treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion;” or “the United States is fundamentally racist,
sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.” In addition, the order rejected federal funding of schools
that do not provide “patriotic education” and celebrate “America’s greatness.” Schools that support “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology” also would be denied funding.
More than thirty organizations joined the OAH and American Historical Association (AHA) in
decrying this order’s “inflammatory” claim that teachers were “imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.”8 They cited, for example, a study
of 3,000 K-12 teachers across the country conducted by the AHA that showed otherwise. “The
executive order’s narrow conception of patriotism and patriotic education,” they charged, “does more than deny the actual history of American democracy; it also undermines its own goals of a
rigorous education and merit-based society.”9 The order also was criticized by many historians
for conflating equity with discrimination, presenting traditional gender ideologies as non-ideological, and creating a climate of fear for teaching students anything about the history of gender,
immigration, slavery, indigeneity, race, sexuality, and many other topics.
Executive Order 14242: Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents,
States, and Communities (Mar. 30, 2025).10
Other executive orders supported the goal of censoring and limiting the teaching of American
history in the nation’s classrooms. This order promoted the devolution of educational powers to
states and localities by enhancing “parental rights” over curriculum, especially regarding race
and gender, and conditioning federal support on compliance with new parental-access rules.
The order, with its open-ended support for parental vetoes over best educational practices and
educational democratization, has discouraged innovation in history education and encouraged
censorship of histories addressing ethnic and racial minorities, Indigenous people, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and women. (For more on how these orders have been applied, see
below on the Department of Education.)
Executive Order 14172: Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness (Jan.
20, 2025).11
Executive Order 14172 was another order that commanded historical erasures. This order directed the Board on Geographic Names to “honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic
Americans in our Nation’s rich past.” Restoring the name of Mount McKinley with a lengthy discussion of the “greatness” of President McKinley’s tariff policies and his leadership during the
Spanish-American War, it never mentioned the mountain’s recently recognized name, “Denali.”
That name, restored in 2015 under President Barack Obama, was used by Alaska Natives such
as the Koyukon for centuries. The order also designated the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,”
a modern political invention rather than a restoration; the gulf had been known as “of Mexico”
since the sixteenth century. The White House later issued a Presidential Proclamation declaring
February 9, 2025, “Gulf of America Day.”12
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