Who Owns American History?

Every nation tells itself a story about where it came from. Arguably, the question that matters more than any particular facts is who gets to tell it. For the past year and a half, Donald Trump’s second administration has been answering that question with unusual bluntness: The president does. Not the thousands of people across the country who have devoted their lives to actually studying, documenting, and understanding the American past. Not the professional societies of historians and archivists and their peer-review panels. Not the museum curators and educators who have spent over sixty years broadening narratives of American history to encompass the diverse multitudes who actually made it.