Opinion: A Guide to Heritage Sites

The Executive Order President Trump signed last year on National Parks, Smithsonian museums, and monuments was designed to counter those who attempt to “rewrite our Nation’s history.” Another EO included the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which often supports exhibits at private sites.

Historians and media outlets huffed, calling his EO’s a “disturbing attack” that pushed a “distorted narrative.” But as we approach our 250th anniversary as a nation, it’s increasingly clear that Trump had a convincing case. Particularly since 2020, our historical sites have been warped by ideology. To give a few examples:

• The National Park Service published a series of 25 articles (removed last year) on places that tell LGBTQ+ history. One of the sites was the Kinsey Institute. Alfred Kinsey infamously oversaw the sexual molestation of 317 boys, beginning at the age of two months. Yet the NPS lauded Kinsey’s “research” for contributing to a “heterosexual-homosexual rating scale, placing the sexual behavior of individuals along a continuum.”
• The American Alliance of Museums, composed of 35,000 museums and museum professionals, assembled a task force co-chaired by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch. The resulting 2020 report begins: “DEAI is integral to excellence in museum practice. FULL STOP.” Museums should shift away from “white-dominant characteristics of perfection, risk aversion, and conflict avoidance.”
• The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum already celebrates a male athlete who identifies as a female.
• James Madison’s home, Montpelier, is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was established by an act of Congress. There are currently no exhibits about Madison at Montpelier. Despite Montpelier not telling the full story, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has given the site close to $1 million.
• A grant from the IMLS funded an exhibit to teach kids about race and slavery. All eight of the featured books are recommended by the radical Southern Poverty Law Center. One contains “imagination exercises” that encourage children in grades 3-5 to imagine themselves as the aggressor, whipping someone until “their flesh cried blood.”

To implement Trump’s National Parks EO, the Department of the Interior has been reviewing signs at National Parks. An example of a flagged exhibit deals with women’s rights, slavery, indigenous killings, and Japanese internment. Such things are part of American history.

But the exhibit is at a wildlife refuge center in New York, home to a large bird habitat, where panels should be about wildlife.

Most citizens want the NPS to grant access to and conserve nature, and to maintain trails and camping sites. As the NPS is funded by taxpayers, public opinion should have some weight.

The NPS was established to preserve “the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Promoting gender ideology, for example, is beyond that commonsense scope and mission.

Such promotion reflects the fixation of a narrow class of intellectual elites. Even families on camping trips are forced to confront power structures. Parks become places to foster division and provoke ideological conversations.

The NPS doesn’t just have authority over wonders like Yellowstone. It also oversees historic sites, and those sites sometimes denigrate the American heritage.

That is one of the reasons The Heritage Foundation recently produced the Heritage Guide to Historic Sites, which evaluates historic sites across the country for accuracy and comprehension, proportionality, and ideological bias.

The battle over historic sites pits those who want DEI against those who want accuracy, proportionality, and civic education.

The DEI argument goes like this: Because women were disenfranchised in the past, we should teach women’s history at every opportunity, no matter how tangential. It is Ibram Kendi’s social justice applied: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home is now a “Center for Literary Activism” that ignores much about Stowe’s life and work.

This approach both skews the past and undermines the civic value of places like battlefields. History is messy and unfolded in a certain way. It cannot be bent to fit into neat categories.

We distort the knowledge of our heritage either when we whitewash it or fixate on the shortcomings. Distortions undermine the ability to recreate history as it really occurred, understand why things happened the way they did, and learn from both the high and low points. Any fair depiction of the American story will be inspiring and triumphant because, despite the setbacks, failures, and contradictions, America has furthered the cause of self-government.

It makes sense to depict both exceptional figures like George Washington, who had an outsized impact on America’s creation and trajectory, as well everyday folks, enslaved and free. Both contributed to building the country. But the latter should not obscure the former. Or come at the expense of key moments in the past.