Historians, librarians, and hundreds of volunteers are documenting objects and signs displayed throughout the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and at sites managed by the National Park Service, fearing that the Trump administration’s recent mandates are imperiling public history.
Two major volunteer groups — Citizen Historians in Washington, DC, and Minnesota’s Save Our Signs — are methodically cataloging thousands of artifacts, including plaques describing Indigenous history at California’s Muir Woods, paintings accompanied by bilingual text at the National Portrait Gallery, and descriptions of slavery at Independence National Park.
The groups hope that their databases will preserve thoughtfully researched and curated historical narratives, as the Trump administration plows ahead with efforts to modify content displays.
Jim Millward, a Georgetown University professor specializing in China and world history, and his colleague Chandra Manning, an American historian focused on the 19th century, learned of a letter sent by the Trump administration to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch in August. The two academics told Hyperallergic they remember feeling alarmed. By the end of the month, Millward and Manning had formed the volunteer initiative Citizen Historians, which has taken more than 31,000 photographs in a period of five weeks — accounting for 56% of the exhibits displayed in the Smithsonian museum system.
The project has so far attracted more than 750 volunteers from the Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia area. Volunteer requests doubled after NPR first reported on the group’s work last week.
Citizen Historians photographed Marguerite Zorach’s painting “Marianne Moore” (1925), accompanied by bilingual text in English and Spanish. (image courtesy Citizen Historians)
Manning, a former park ranger, told Hyperllergic that she was most alarmed by the Trump administration’s proposed addition of QR codes to displays in National Parks in May, which asked the public to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans” or that “fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” The administration also asked park staff to report such signage.
Since the Save Our Signs project was addressing the National Parks content orders, Manning turned her attention to the Smithsonian, which has been under similar scrutiny from the White House.
The implications of Trump’s promised “content corrections” for the Smithsonian could have real-world consequences, Manning said.
“One could say, ‘There are a whole lot of problems in the world. What difference does it make, what shows up on our museum walls?’” Manning said. “My answer to that would be that if it is possible to edit stories, experiences, people, and whole groups out of the past, it becomes that much easier to edit or erase them from the present or even the future.”
Left to right: Chandra Manning, Jim Millward, and Jessica Dickinson Goodman (photos courtesy Citizen Historians)
Millward and Manning are working with Georgetown University graduate student Jessica Dickinson Goodman to build the digital infrastructure needed to store and eventually publicly release images captured by the group’s volunteers. For now, volunteer teams are assigned exhibitions to document, and they then upload images to a designated Google Drive folder. Each sub volunteer group is led by a “captain” who facilitates the process.
“It is never going to meet the gold standard of the beautiful documentation that [the Smithsonian] does in every exhibit,” Goodman told Hyperallergic. “But I believe that resilient systems have multiple reservoirs of truth that you can access, and this provides one more reservoir, and it’s hard to squash a shared truth.”
Millward said he hopes the project is all a “waste of time” and that none of the flurry of executive orders and memos takes full effect. Drawing comparatively from his studies of historical events that have been erased from China’s public discourse, Millward said he interprets Trump’s attempt to alter historical narratives and exhibition items as a “sign of lack of confidence.”
“If you’re always hiding behind propaganda, that’s not a sign of strength, that’s not a sign of confidence, but quite the opposite,” Millward said. “I think the largest museum complex in the world is a huge attraction for international visitors, as well as Americans. That’s where we can lay it all out and tell it in different ways and give different perspectives.”
A description of slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia (image courtesy Save Our Signs)
Manning, Goodman, and Millward consulted with the Save Our Signs initiative before embarking on their own public history project. The group, founded in conjunction with the Data Rescue Project and comprised of Minnesota librarians and historians as well as volunteers across the country, has been tracking instances of sign removal or alteration in a publicly accessible spreadsheet. On the project’s website, members of the public can compare before-and-after snapshots of altered signs, such as one at Muir Woods in California this June that was reportedly scrubbed of historical details pertaining to Indigenous people, women, and instances of racism.
Molly Blake, a founding member of Save Our Signs and social sciences librarian at the University of Minnesota, told Hyperallergic that the group has now collected over 10,000 photos of signs across national parks, gathering them in a Google Drive and releasing them periodically to the public.
“I really do think everything’s at risk,” Blake said, referring to the Trump administration’s vague order to remove any “negative” content. This month, a reproduction of a ubiquitous photo attesting to the brutality of slavery, “The Scourged Back,” was reportedly ordered removed from Fort Polaski National Monument in Georgia.
“The photograph is a really important way for people to understand a very traumatic and painful part of US history,” Blake said, “and real history, of course, is not just happy stories or that make us feel comfortable.”
Both groups are still figuring out how they will store their data in the long term, but for now, they have acted quickly to try to capture American history as it has been chronicled by curators, historians, and government officials over the centuries. The Trump administration has called for measures to be taken at both the National Parks and the Smithsonian in accordance with its content requests beginning this month, though the full scope of the actions is not yet known.
“The Smithsonian doesn’t belong to one person,” Manning told Hyperallergic. “All of these things are part of our shared national treasures, and usually that means we all get to enjoy them, but sometimes it means that all of us have to take responsibility for safeguarding them, and that’s what’s happening right now.”
