The Current War on History

“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”

– George Orwell, renowned author and historian

In 2022, the Russian organization Memorial won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in educating Russian citizens and the world about Soviet state crimes committed during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Memorial also helped set up sites of remembrance to honor Stalin’s victims. Yuri Dmitriev, one of Memorial’s major leaders, is credited with leading the research that uncovered a burial site in the forest of Sandarmokh, in what is now the Republic of Karelia, where thousands of Soviet citizens had been murdered in 1936 and 1937 by the Stalin regime.

In 2014, Memorial was labeled a subversive organization by Russia’s Ministry of Justice. Two years later Yuri Dmitriev was arrested on bogus charges of child pornography. He was acquitted but was recharged and imprisoned. In 2021, the Russian government permanently shut down Memorial.

In 2017, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party replaced the director of Poland’s Museum of the Second World War after the museum noted various populations that suffered at the hands of the Nazis and their Polish abettors during the war. The museum featured the historical tragedies of the murder of Polish Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. In 2018, the Polish parliament passed a law criminalizing any suggestion that Poland bore responsibility, including well-documented pogroms committed by Poles during the Nazi occupation.

In January of  2025, Donald J. Trump, by executive orders, authorized the removal of historical references to slavery, the Underground Railroad, lynchings, and Jim Crow from American National Parks. That same year he pressured national museums to remove similar content that he considered “divisive” and “woke” and that played into “racial ideology.”

“True history, undiluted history is where the healing can start.” 

 – Bea Butler, EdD, Racial Advancement Specialist and RARE Board Member

What appears to be a war on history in America has seen a sudden escalation during the last 12 years and has coincided with the rise of authoritarian politicians around the world. This echoes similar erasures of history led by fascist leaders of the 1930’s who tried to create mythical pasts to which they wanted to return: To make their countries great again.

An apparent whitewashing of history escalated to a fever pitch following the 2020 brutal police murder of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who plead for his life while he was being choked to death. A long overdue national and international outrage and racial reckoning erupted, which was soon followed by an orchestrated racial denial led by the former and now current president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

Within two months after returning to the White House, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March of 2025  called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Soon after the order, the current administration began purges of historical displays in National Parks, primarily of episodes involving African Americans and other historically marginalized groups as they strove for equality. Pressure was put on museums to remove historical writings, images, and artifacts that told of episodes of oppression that have belied America’s founding principles.

If there is a common denominator in the Trump administration’s war on history, it is that of race, which has been targeted from the outset. In addition to national parks and museums, this administration has targeted public universities and K-12 education by purging curricula that it finds offensive, or of what it refers to as racial ideology. Some Republican-led states have banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory, an explanation of structural racism advanced nearly a century ago by prominent white scholars.

The attempted eraser of Black history, particularly the horrors of slavery, has coincided with new government policies that have attacked programs instituted to mitigate the historical harms done to Black Americans. The current administration has attacked Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in government, education, and in the private sector with zeal, even criminalizing such efforts. The Trump administration has stripped funding from institutions that are suspected of DEI efforts.

The erasure of Black history certainly figured enormously in the current conservative Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, opening the gates for voting restrictions that will invariably and disproportionately hamper Black voter turnout in future elections.

The erasing of histories of certain segments of the American population has dehumanized people, often resulting in a loss of empathy from their fellow citizens. The erasures have and can lead to ignorance about cruelties such as economic exclusion, loss of freedoms, mass incarceration, and in the case of Native Americans, near extermination.

In the 1870’s a movement in the former Confederacy by white historians to whitewash slavery and glorify a “Lost Cause” of the former slave states was followed by a concerted effort to distort the county’s understanding of Reconstruction. The narrative they spun about Reconstruction blamed African Americans for their poor conditions, claiming that they had wasted their freedom. They blamed elected Black officials for incompetence and corruption, distortions to which Southerners and much of America held for nearly a century afterwards. Consequently, much of America looked the other way as Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow rose.

The eminent scholar and historian W.E.B. Du Bois sought to set the record of Reconstruction straight in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction In America. Du Bois heralded Black Americans as key to winning the Civil War and instituting post-Civil War changes that had brought federal rebuilding funds and public education to the South.

Despite Du Bois’s efforts, the damaging myths spread by Southern whites continued to shape how much of America saw African Americans, and meaningful change in civil rights did not occur until the 1950’s.

In the recent past America has seen its shared history attacked, whitewashed, and even erased. Truth and facts have been replaced by an ideology that tries to advance a single story, a single perspective. Such a portrayal allows politicians to stoke fear by emphasizing racial, religious, and cultural differences in campaigns that focus on “us” versus “them” scenarios. Debates over ideas have given way to rhetoric that has made the country angrier and unhealthier.

Democracies thrive on free thought. Democracies thrive on access to education, books, debate, and a recognition that history is multifaceted and dynamic and that there are generational stories written into the American narrative that can never be erased.

More on this matter in the next newsletter.