We covered Trump’s executive order on American history here. Today at The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight offers his thoughts.
A taste:
According to the president, “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then comes that penetrating epithet, the order’s organizing logic: the desire to end the “revisionist movement” carried out by unnamed historians.
I recall that a great historian, Prof. James Horton, used to have a poignant answer to this label: “Would you want your doctors not to be revisionists?” Any field of study must innovate to maintain relevance. The assumption that there is a standard, agreed-upon truth about the country’s past is a fantasy. But when declared by a sitting American president, it becomes a provocation and an insult.
The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.
Writing in 1980, in what may have seemed a more placid and hopeful time, the historian John Hope Franklin observed the “transformation” of scholarship on American history into many new, robust fields, as well as an explosion of popular interest in proliferating historical societies, sites and museums.
Read the entire piece here.