When my youngest child was in 6th grade in the fall of 2020, he was required to take Minnesota history. That year, thanks to the pandemic, school mostly happened in the kids’ bedrooms, and for a change I, a historian, got to follow along with his history education firsthand. The course included triumphs and atrocities, division and community-building, some of the worst and some of the best humanity has to offer.
He learned about the mass execution of Dakota men in 1862. He learned that the beautiful spot where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers come together was used during the same period as a concentration camp to hold over 1,600 Dakota men, women, and children, many of whom died in the horrific conditions there. Yet he also studied the Quakers who, during World War II, refused to take up arms, but wanted to help the hungry people of Europe and Asia, and so volunteered for the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, sacrificing their own health to learn how to heal others.
When my youngest child was in 6th grade in the fall of 2020, he was required to take Minnesota history. That year, thanks to the pandemic, school mostly happened in the kids’ bedrooms, and for a change I, a historian, got to follow along with his history education firsthand. The course included triumphs and atrocities, division and community-building, some of the worst and some of the best humanity has to offer.
He learned about the mass execution of Dakota men in 1862. He learned that the beautiful spot where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers come together was used during the same period as a concentration camp to hold over 1,600 Dakota men, women, and children, many of whom died in the horrific conditions there. Yet he also studied the Quakers who, during World War II, refused to take up arms, but wanted to help the hungry people of Europe and Asia, and so volunteered for the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, sacrificing their own health to learn how to heal others.
I’ve been thinking about that middle school state history class of late. Both the Trump administration and Republican state governments are trying to seize control of the teaching of history, basing their moves on the claim that history should be patriotic, and by which they mean a happy fable promoting fealty to the current regime in which our ancestors did no wrong.
The core assertion of such claims is that patriotism emerges from denial of the messiness, the ugliness, of history. That’s just not true. Far from divisive, this clear-eyed view of the past built connections between my kid and the place where we live, helping him place himself in a complicated, diverse, but inclusive community.
My child is trans (and has asked me to write about this). One of the histories U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to purge is his: a history, a society, with a space for a trans boy to live openly, to feel included and respected for who he is. Transgender people have always been part of our history and always will be; the question is how much repression and silencing they’ll face.
At the end of March, Trump released yet another executive order (EO), this one aimed at purging national cultural institutions of “improper ideology.” Essentially, the EO is an assault on public memory and public history as preserved in federal sites. The order is especially concerned with exhibits or presentations that explore the power of racism in American history.
The EO mandates restoring any exhibits or statues that came down during the Biden presidency (presumably thinking of Confederate statues, though historian Kevin Levin points out most of those are state monuments), teaching that race is a biological reality (it isn’t), orders the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum to exclude trans women, and targets the National Museum of African American History and Culture for its teaching about race and racism. The only historical narrative permitted must reveal “consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and [our] unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
This order follows a similar pattern to others, including the “1776 Commission” established late in 2020, disbanded by President Joe Biden, and reformed early in 2025. An earlier memo, published on just the ninth day of Trump’s second term, opened with the assertion, “Parents trust America’s schools to … instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.” Like the more recent document, it focused on erasing the history of racism from the story we tell about American history, while also blaming schools for forcing transgender identity on students.
These are not intellectually serious documents, though the consequences may indeed be serious. An email response from Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch vowed to continue the work shaped by “the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation’s history, challenges, and triumphs,” but carefully did not contradict the executive order in so many words. Museums are already losing their most important exhibits, displays memorializing the achievements of anyone who wasn’t a white man are being taken down or painted over, and schools are being robbed of funding—which is all taking place within the context of a federal government stripped for parts.
The Smithsonian and public displays of history in federal buildings have enormous symbolic impact, but of course most education curriculum decisions happen at the state level. Conservative state governments have long pushed K-12 curricula that match the rhetoric of the executive orders but recently have become more proactive in controlling content in public higher education. Florida, for example, removed a sociology course from its list of approved core courses. Utah’s legislature just announced new requirements for mandatory “Western civilization” courses, which one lawmaker clarified to mean “the rise of Christianity.”
Every authoritarian regime tries to take over the teaching of history, to seize control of the past. In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, philosopher Jason Stanley writes about the way authoritarians around the world seek to craft a “mythic past” while “[centering] education as a means of erasing concepts and histories that stand in the way of fascist goals.”
Stanley, who has just left the United States due to “the deteriorating political situation,” pays particular attention to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, in many ways the model for the current Trump administration’s attempt to control American higher education—lawsuits, direct threats, taking over boards of trustees and the like, misuse of accreditation, and direct governmental orders related to curriculum. The “again” in MAGA has always pointed in this direction, the need to craft a nostalgic fable linking an imagined American past to the present, with the moral of the story that happiness and prosperity can only emerge out of patriotic fealty to the current regime.
Again, this kind of move makes the Trump administration not exceptional but typical of the global right’s attempt to rewrite history. The French center and right, for example, seek to minimize the history of Algeria as a French colony, both to deny claims of genocide by French soldiers and officials and to limit the claims of modern Algerians within France. In China, perhaps in an even more apt comparison, the 2020s will provide ample centenary moments for the government to celebrate: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the initial uprisings in 1927, and so forth. In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping at once encouraged citizens to know their history, while launching a “historical nihilism” hotline, so citizens could inform on any “wrong ideas and viewpoints” that might be shared.
Similarly, the United States has already entered a multiyear cycle commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, but it’s about to intensify as the calendar turns to April, taking the country from celebrations of Paul Revere’s ride (April 18-19, 1775) to the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). The executive orders targeting the Smithsonian strongly suggest that the Trump administration will bleach the story of American history in a way that tries to claim legitimacy for our current post-constitutional order.
The ritual anniversary moments intensify national mythmaking, moving the story to the formation of the nation, with the new authoritarians controlling any and all official narratives in ways that emphasize not the rebellion against a British king, but a submission to the new American one. As historical claims go, trying to make Trump into the culmination of the American Revolutionary War is no more intellectually serious than those executive orders, but mythmaking doesn’t have to be true to be effective.
As historians, as Americans, as teachers and students, we’re going to need to engage these false narratives not just with fact-checking, but with better, truer storytelling of our own. And we don’t need to make myths to claim patriotism for our side. Looking clearly at the past—whether recognizing the truth about the local historical concentration camp or the much bigger story about the long struggle to put ideals about multiracial democracy into true practice—is patriotic.
The Trump administration, like other authoritarian powers, uses the rhetoric of patriotism because it’s effective. People want to believe that their country can be a force for good. Historians can counter it directly, not by denying the need for patriotism but instead by claiming it for those of us who see hope in contingency, hope in the ability to tell a story about people making choices, and in understanding the terrible or beautiful consequences of those choices.
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