The Brooklyn Rail

When it comes to American history, Washington, DC is a place where representation is in constant tension with reality. It is not a surprise, then, that at the nation’s semiquincentennial, the memorial landscape of the district and many of the cultural institutions that call it home have been at the center of recent conflicts over national memory. Since its inauguration, the current administration has taken unprecedented moves to change the public art landscape of DC, as well as assert control over institutions from the Kennedy Center to the Smithsonian, all in order to control the narrating of American history.

A striking example of these interventions was the March 2025 Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which Donald Trump’s administration levelled an attack against the Smithsonian Institution and recent historical scholarship that it presented.¹ The order complained: “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”² The point of critique from the administration seemed to suggest that critical engagements with the ugly truths of American history in spaces like the Smithsonian were degradations to American greatness.

Be wary when “revisionist history” is leveled as an accusation. Arguably all scholarly history writing is revisionist in that it seeks to offer more accurate accounts of the past by adding to, revising, and reinterpreting the historical record with the rich perspective of hindsight. Historical scholarship, in a sense, is an ongoing process, deeply tied to the present and extending into the future. Revisionist scholarship in the last few decades has resulted from demands for descriptions of the past that more accurately reflect the breadth of American experience.

Resistance to revision belies a desire to control how the past can be narrated and who can narrate it. In fact, the administration’s insistence on reverting to debunked historical narratives while suppressing histories focused on inclusivity or complication—what we might call a “reversionist history”—mobilizes the past in a way that is itself deeply revisionist. While this reversionism may not express a coherent or good faith theory about history, there are some important implications underlying this attitude about the past that are played out across DC and its institutions: first, that it seeks to supplant and foreclose a multi-vocal and inclusive account of American history, and second, that it seeks to restructure and control our relation to this flattened version of American history.

The administration followed the March order with its August 2025 “Letter to the Smithsonian: Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials” in which the administration demanded an in-depth review of Smithsonian materials and processes in order begin “content corrections” to replace what it described as “divisive or ideologically driven language” in Smithsonian displays.³ It would seem that only an American history replete with victories and figures presented as unimpeachable heroes would be allowed in DC’s institutions of memory. The city and American history would thus be reduced to a Disneyland-like simulacrum where most Americans do not play any meaningful roles in discourse about the past beyond those of passive consumers or de facto extras in a pre-manufactured spectacle of consent.

The desire to foreclose critical public engagements with history extends beyond the Smithsonian. For example, the administration installed a replica of a statue of Christopher Columbus toppled by Baltimore protesters in 2020 outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In its iconoclasm, the people-driven destruction of the original Columbus sculpture was part of a nationwide agitation for a critical reassessment of art about the past in order to better understand the disconnections between national mythologies and lived experiences in the present. This reassessment of history has been a point of major anxiety for the administration. Thus, the symbolic erasure of the 2020 toppling of the Columbus statue and the political movement it represented mirrors the erasure of the DC-commissioned “Black Lives Matter” mural on 16th Street.

For all their failures, institutions like the Smithsonian were founded on the complex pursuit of truth. It must be hard for the scientists, historians, curators, and museum specialists of the Smithsonian, much less the public, to imagine their institution without its dedication to critical inquiry. The administration’s intimidation campaign has likely yielded some anticipatory obedience in Smithsonian review processes and future exhibitions, as suggested by the withdrawal of Amy Sherald’s 2025 exhibition American Sublime from the National Portrait Gallery.⁴ But, to its credit, the Smithsonian has largely resisted removing existing exhibitions and texts. And it is clear that such resistance would not be possible without the intense public interest and media scrutiny that has followed. Groups like the “Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian” have carried out a crowd-sourced documentation of all the labels throughout the institution’s museums; thus, any acquiescence to the administration’s demands would result in public outcry.⁵ In this way, the public has very much taken history into its own hands. The will to public memory can also be seen in other advocacy groups, such as the Living New Deal, which has been documenting and resisting the proposed destruction of significant WPA-era artworks in DC’s Cohen Building.⁶

This people-centered intervention has also spilled out onto the public monumental landscape of DC, where a group of anonymous artists have repeatedly erected gold-leafed statues of Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein using National Park permits and first-amendment protections. In this way they have created temporary interventions that disrupt the monumental narratives projected throughout the city, creating dynamic connections between American history and an ever-unfolding and contentious present. Other spaces like the People’s Archive at the DC Public Library reflect that a tradition of engaged and dynamic public scholarship has always undergirded the monumental landscape of the city.⁷ Through it all, the people will revise history and preserve the past in all of its deep complexity.