History has been Disappearing from government websites.
First, it was Stonewall. The word “Transgender” was eliminated From the National Parques Service page that commemorates the Stonewall survey of 1969, in which Trans Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera activists played a central role. The LGBTQ acronym also changed to only “LGB”.
So, Harriet Tubman was erased From a page on the underground railroad, and the language changed to highlight “white/black cooperation.” A page on Jackie Robinson’s army service was low tasks Of the Pentagon website. (Both pages were restored later after public criticism). A Washington Post investigation also found that at least Half boxes pages that refer to Little Rock NineBlack students who integrated a high school in Arkansas in the 1950s previously said that the students had “opened doors” for those looking for “equality and education.” Now, the pages say that students were only “education” of Seijs.
The editions come in the middle of the impulse of the Trump administration for End of and “Restore truth and sanity“For American history, an effort that causes alarm between historians such as Yale David W. Blight’s professor.
In an interview with Noel King in Today, explained, Blight says that changes are equivalent to a shameless attempt to rewrite our past, but that the United States is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and revealed and resumed its narration of events so many times that it could well resemble the file name of the final project of a high school student.
Below is an extract of the conversation, edited by length and clarity. There is much more in the complete podcast, so listen Today, explained You have no podcasts, including Apple podcasts” Spotifyor wherever you get your podcasts.
Journalists often say: “Donald Trump is not preceded. The things he does is not precedents.” But I imagine that you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points.
Give me some examples of the times we have tried to do this.
Duration of World War II, the United States created a mass propaganda machine called information from the War Office. That is what governments make the duration of war. That organization was dedicated to many propaganda, selling stories to keep patriotic Americans.
Advancing from that to McCarthyism: Anticomunism was a very deep phenomenon in the United States and not without any reason in the 30s and 40s. But the McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts to try to control what the writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything.
Let’s take the civil war. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the south called South Historical Society. Originally it was mainly made up of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had, why they had really fought, what their crusade meant, which was really the confederation.
What was the story they were trying to sell?
They told a story that we have come to know as the “Confederate Lost Cause.” That is, they were arguing from the beginning that they really did not have the war on the battlefield, they only lost to higher numbers and resources. They said that only for “the Leviathan of North Industrialization.” There is something really in that, but that is not the complete explanation.
They also argued that war was not really about slavery. It really was the state sovereignty and the rights of the states. It really was about resisting federal interference with their lives and civilization and their morays and folways …
Can I jump and tell you something?
I am from the center of New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned.
Why did I learn something that was not true in public school?
Because over time, in culture, education, politics and rituals of the 1870s and 80s in the twentieth century and still surviving in a textbook from which I was learning in the 1990s, I regret to hear that this idea had this TH. But he had to join again.
How do you get together again so horribly divided? You will have to find mutuality. You will have to find a child or unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives that developed in the nineteenth century, and there is reality in this, is that you join around the value of the soldiers. But if we admire at value without looking at the cause they fought, of course it is limited.
“Our greatness is in the surprising shots and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.”
Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everyone in that war had the cause they believed. And if you struggled for the cause you thought with great value, you struggled on the right [reasons]. Everyone was the same in value. The causes had to be silenced, set aside. Well, you know, that is also part of human relationships: how do a family stay together? Well, there are some things you don’t talk about.
But for whole nations and peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation, the identity of your past and now your future, will leave someone out. In fact, you can end up allowing you to reconcile in the back of those who must suffer the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in the United States, that meant blacks. It meant that their civil and political rights, which were created and then abandoned slow but sure and then crushed in the South Jim Crow system.
Now, the point of all this is that the Confederate lost cause, which said that the South fought for the noble ends, fought for their homes, fought for their superity, fought for their integrity. … It is possible that he becomes, he thought, not a loss story at all. It becomes, in the 1890s and the twentieth century, a victory narrative.
This was an era of a lot of sentimental literature. The Americans came to love the stories of the old South. Of course, he is there in Gone with the windEven so, perhaps the most famous movie has ever done. Then, the lost cause was both a political movement and a literary movement. But it was essence a racial ideology, and lasts a lot of time.
Let’s compare what we are seeing today. What are you talking about with popular books and Gone with the windThat seems more subtle than the president who says: “You eliminate that information about Jackie Robinson’s military service from the website.” What Trump is doing successful because he is so subtle?
That is a very good question and my instinctive answer, and in part it is my illusory answer, it will not. It is not subtle, you are right: they are eliminating websites. They are explicitly saying: “Professional history, either in our greatest museums or in our best university, taught us all wrong forms. They have divided our legs.” This is the word they love to use: the story we write has divisive, divisive, divisive bone.
Well, no, it is not. It is simply information. Sometimes people get angry and sometimes make them argue and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpist is doing is telling us that they know people of best policy at the Heritage or Pseudo-History Foundation who think that studying all these things on race, gender, all the ethnicities that are composed, all this greatness of pluralism. “They use that term a lot:” We are no longer teaching our youth about American greatness. ”
Yes, we are! We are teaching our youth that our greatness is in pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing stersons and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.
What will you know about World War, try to find nothing more than greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if everything you want to know is about greatness? What really will they know, about Native American history if everything you are looking for is greatness?
Challenge the intelligence of anyone with education and many people who do not have much formal education. At this time I am not very optimistic about what is happening, but I have a certain faith that people are simply not going to buy this.
