Outside the Smithsonian Castle, construction crews are scrambling to build President Donald Trump’s version of American history on the National Mall: the Great American State Fair. The 16-day “World’s Fair-scale event” of concerts, carnival rides and state-themed exhibits will celebrate “AMERICAN GREATNESS” and “our heritage, our flag, and our glorious American freedom.”
Inside the Castle a few feet away, the Smithsonian Institution plans to tell a more complex version of the country’s past.
“American Aspirations,” an exhibition opening Tuesday in the newly reopened Smithsonian headquarters, will also acknowledge the darker corners of the country’s history, recognizing that it’s still striving to live up to the ideals on which it was founded 250 years ago.
The exhibit, co-curated by the head of the Smithsonian, Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, gathers more than 30 objects from across the Smithsonian’s sprawling collections to trace how successive generations of Americans have reached — and fallen short of — the ideals first set down in the Declaration of Independence.
“America has never reached the promised land, but it has founding documents that inspire us to try to get there,” Bunch said Thursday during a walkthrough of the show. “The word ‘pursuit’ is so powerful — we’re in the pursuit of liberty, we’re in the pursuit of freedom — we’re better than we once were, but we’re still in pursuit of that.”
Organized around six themes, each preceded by the phrase “In Pursuit of,” the exhibition opens with Thomas Jefferson’s portable writing desk, the small mahogany box on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. From there it fans outward through nearly 250 years of American history: Frederick Douglass’s Civil War recruitment poster, which implored free Black men to enlist with the line “Are Freedmen Less Brave Than Slaves?”; Harriet Tubman’s hymnal; Daniel K. Inouye’s Medal of Honor; Amelia Earhart’s flight suit paired with Sally Ride’s NASA uniform; Thomas Edison’s original incandescent bulb; FDR’s fireside chat microphone; and a terra-cotta maquette of the Statue of Liberty — standing, Bunch took pains to note, on the broken chains of slavery.
The exhibition also includes a piece of Plymouth Rock. Bunch, characteristically, made sure the complications came with it. “You have this notion that this is the beginning of America,” he said. “Then you have someone like Malcolm X saying, ‘Plymouth Rock — we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.’ I like that complication.”
Abeer Saha, a curator at the National Museum of American History and one of the exhibition’s three co-curators, said the team began with 150 million objects and worked down to roughly 30, knowing they were operating in a small room and a fraught moment.
“We have not backed down in any way,” Saha said. “We haven’t changed history and the stories that we want to tell. Have we been aware that there will be eyes on ‘American Aspirations’? Indeed.”
The word “pursuit,” Saha said, was not accidental. “‘In pursuit’ implies we’re not there. In fact, we may never be there, but we will always pursue the greatest ideals that can take birth in our own hearts and minds.”
The exhibition opens at a delicate juncture for the institution. Since Trump’s return to office last year, the White House has subjected the Smithsonian to an escalating series of demands: a sweeping executive order calling for the removal of “improper ideology” from its museums, the departure of a museum director under presidential pressure, a formal content review and a threat to withhold federal funds if the Smithsonian didn’t comply. Earlier this year, the Portrait Gallery quietly removed wall text mentioning Trump’s impeachments before restoring the reference this month.
Bunch has navigated the pressure carefully, acknowledging to staff last year that some Smithsonian content “has not aligned with our institutional values of scholarship, evenhandedness and nonpartisanship,” while maintaining publicly that curatorial decisions remain the institution’s alone. Thursday was no different. He rejected the notion that “American Aspirations” was a rebuttal to anything happening outside the Castle walls.
“I don’t think it’s a rebuttal,” he said. “It is simply saying this is the way the Smithsonian views history. The great strength is a nation grappling with itself, trying to be made better.”
That framing — a nation always becoming, never arrived — sits in quiet but unmistakable tension with the administration’s preferred historical posture. Trump’s March 2025 executive order warned that “the American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history.”
Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, which supplied the bulk of the exhibition’s objects, said the anniversary is its own occasion to sit with difficult questions. “We’re the world’s longest sustained democracy,” she said. “What do we need to do to come together to make sure that it endures? Some big questions. This is a great year to reflect.”
Bunch, who has spent his career arguing that the Smithsonian’s job is to help people remember not just what they want to remember but what they need to, said he hoped visitors leave the Castle with an America they can be proud of and eager to improve.
“As great as America is, it’s only great because people challenge, people ask fundamental questions, people debate it, people die,” he said. “That’s what’s so powerful to me.”
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