President Trump’s recent executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” states that there has been a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” and promote a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” To address that, Trump calls for “revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.”
Critics charge that Trump’s order, issued in late March, is an attempt to whitewash and sanitize American history in federal institutions, ignoring slavery and other “uncomfortable” issues.
These arguments are set to come to a head before a three-judge panel in Philadelphia’s Third Circuit Court on June 2. As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, the controversy before the court pits two very different interpretations of how to portray the President’s House in National Independence Historical Park in Philadelphia, which is managed by the Interior Department’s National Park Service (NPS). The President’s House is the site where George Washington and John Adams lived during their presidencies in the 1790s, before Washington, D.C. and the White House were built.
In 2010, after an eight-year campaign by a local activist organization, Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), working in conjunction with the Democratic political leadership of the city of Philadelphia, the President’s House exhibit opened. After more than half a decade, ATAC and the city of Philadelphia succeeded in pressuring the National Park Service to accept an exhibition at the President’s House site centering almost exclusively on the evils of slavery in George Washington’s household during his presidency.
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