Those visions have always been competing, says Angela Diaz, an associate professor specializing in Civil War history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
A large majority of Americans — for instance, women, people of color, the impoverished — did not, in fact, flourish during the so-called golden eras of the past, Diaz and other historians note.
For many groups, a return to the past would mean “erasing a lot of the legal, economic, political, technological, social progress that the country has made and calling all of that into question,” Diaz says.
Diaz also says history should include more stories: “The more voices we have in our history, the fuller it is, the richer it is. And I would say the more accurate it is, in terms of its complexity.”
The Organization of American Historians agrees. In its response to Trump’s order on American History, it warned that his action “proposes to rewrite 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.”
In some instances, legal challenges have put some of the initiatives on hold for now.
Conservatives applaud Trump’s moves
Conservative groups have largely welcomed Trump’s push to influence history and culture. That includes the Heritage Foundation, creators of Project 2025, which lays out how the president should combat what it calls “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’”
Jonathan Butcher, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow focusing on education, praises Trump’s reinstatement of the 1776 Project on U.S. history. The presidential advisory commission’s report was released in the final days of Trump’s first administration.
It was seen as a counterpoint to the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times. The Pulitzer Prize-winning series’ goal was, in its own words, to reframe American history by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The 1776 Report lists what the advisory commission described as five “challenges to America’s principles”: slavery, progressivism, fascism, communism and “racism and identity politics.”
“I think that document helps to underlie the executive orders that have come” from the White House, Butcher says.
When the administration looks to prohibit DEI programs in schools, he adds, “it is with the understanding that those particular concepts are based on racial favoritism.”
Butcher agrees that there is a tension between two fundamental approaches to history: one focusing on America’s ideals, and one focusing on the country’s failures to embody them.
“Those two ideas are always going to be in competition in American life,” Butcher says. The country’s story includes the institution of slavery and the Jim Crow era, he explains, as well as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the notion of God-given individual rights.
In Butcher’s view, the history of race in the U.S. has been portrayed recently in inaccurate or problematic ways, citing both The 1619 Project and an influential essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh.
Criticizing those works, Butcher argues that they’re based on the “idea that there are burdens that America will either never get around or that systemic racism can’t be resolved.”
“It doesn’t give students the chance to look back in American history and say these were, of course, imperfect people who were trying, in many cases, in key cases, to live up to America’s founding ideals,” Butcher says. “And I think that that’s the message that we need to be giving to the next generation.”
Renaming places can unite people — if done correctly
In the U.S., recent pushes to transform how the past is remembered echo another large-scale attempt at revamping history: the Redemption era.
In the decades after the Civil War, white Southerners led a violent counteraction to Reconstruction and sought a return to the old order based on white supremacy. Statues and monuments sprang up to honor the Confederacy. Through at least the 1940s, U.S. military bases were named for Confederate leaders, according to the U.S. Army.
In the 1950s and ’60s, as tensions again rose over civil rights in the U.S., so did memorials to the Confederacy.
In the past decade, many monuments and memorials linked to white supremacy made headlines again. This time, they’ve been targeted for removal or renaming during a national reckoning that grew after shocking events such as the mass shooting that killed nine Black worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
A similar dynamic can be seen in other countries: In times of social and political upheaval, leaders seek to refocus the lens of history.
Political regimes seek “to represent and manipulate landscapes to promote their own ideological and political objectives,” says Martha Lungi Kabinde-Machate, who studies language and names at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa.
Changing things like street names, she says, helps politicians focus “on cleansing, restoring, and transforming memory.”
Kabinde-Machate has analyzed what happened after the end of apartheid when South Africa renamed geographic markers like streets. The most successful efforts, she says, use eponyms “that unite people rather than names that cause divisions … These [uniting] names include athletes, poets, scholars, doctors, and musicians.”
In some ways, President Trump appears to be following this thinking: Many people to be featured in the “Garden of American Heroes” are from entertainment (Alex Trebek) and sports (Kobe Bryant). But his approach to military forts and historical markers is more divisive.
Trump previously opposed a plan to rename U.S. bases if their namesakes were Confederate figures. And in his second term, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has restored names such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. The Pentagon says those two installations now honor U.S. veterans with the same last names as Confederate officers. But as Hegseth announced the change to the now-former Fort Liberty in North Carolina, he stated, “That’s right: Bragg is back.”
Such reversions raise a question: The Trump administration’s push to remake American history is stirring controversy, but what kind of lasting effects might it have?
“As long as the data is not lost, it seems all reversible,” Vanderbilt’s Cowie says. “Especially since they’re executive orders, which you can immediately reverse with a new regime.”
If Trump’s intent is to make changes that truly resonate and reflect America, Kabinde-Machate’s work suggests that the process should be transparent. The goal, she says, is that “everyone has a chance to participate and express their opinions on the process; the information should be made public.”
