Harper’s Ferry, W.Va. (AP) – President Donald Trump has made the government communicate with the rapids of converging river roaring Happy stories of American history We face the most severe challenges. There is There is no aggressive spin in slavery.
In frozen time Harpers Ferry National Historical Parkthe people of the National Park Service are navigating the shallow waters that the national federal government stories have to negotiate now. If it’s not the whole truth, how do you tell the truth?
As part of the broader thing Trump Order Reaching the government and the nation-wide, Park Services has been ordered to review interpretive material with all its historical property and remove or alter the explanation that “improperly disgraces the past or living Americans,” or otherwise hardens the story of Americans. This comes when the Republican president complains about an institution that, in his view, “how bad slavery is.”
It is too early to know whether his orders are bent towards revisionism that disinfected the arc of history. At the very least, there are indications that reviewers may be cautiously stepping into reconstructing their core American story.
John Brown Raider’s descendants want the whole truth
Brianna Wheeler wants them to stay true to history. She is one direct descendant of that Anti-slavery attacker John Brown, abolitionist Those who surrounded the American arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in a bloody 1859 attack set on the stage of a civil war. The shame of slavery should not be ignored, she said.
“We can’t wipe that out,” she told The Associated Press. “You cannot erase it. It is our duty to ensure that it is not erased.”
In some parks, ground employees have told the Associated Press that pamphlets with reference to “Enslavers” are being pulled for revisions, and everything has gotten a harsh look.
However, on a guided tour of Brown’s assault, the stories presented about slavery remain unshakable. And Pulaski National Fort Outside of Savannah, Georgia, a photograph of a whipped yet dignified man with welt on his back still occupying a prominent place during a recent visit at a visitor center.
The caption: “Enforcement of slavery relied on violence.”
There are still some changes
The deadline was recently passed to Parks officials to remove “inappropriate content” from public displays. He then asked more than 80 Democrats to the National Park Service chief to pay full accounts for changes made to the “pursuit of censorship and erasure.”
The Sierra Club, which tracks changes nationwide, said over 1,000 items have been flagged for reviews at National Parks. But it only checked an example of the sign being removed. it’s been Muir Woods National Monument In California.
During the Biden administration, emphasising violent movement of Indigenous peoples, enslavement by missionaries, and other harms created by the privileged class was changed. The yellow sticky notes were attached to existing language to close the story. Because the sign is gone.
The Home Office order covers more than history. Nature Parks should also flag “emphasizing issues that are unrelated to beauty, richness, or grandeur.” It means a reference to climate change or other degradation of human nature.
Maine’s Acadia National Park has now gone 10 indications citing climate change, said D-Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree.
“Our national parks are not propaganda signs,” she told the Interior Secretary. Doug Burgham In a letter. “They are where millions of people come every year to learn, reflect and confront both the beauty of our shared history and the difficult truths.” The Ministry of Home Affairs did not confirm the changes to Acadia.
There is also pressure to brighten up the American story. Come to the Smithsonian Society Museumget most of their money from the government.
Trump threatened to cut funds by posting on social media that the museum was about “how scary our country is, how bad slavery is, how insufficient it was being abused.” In fact, history museums reflect rich achievements in industry, science, culture, war and heritage of injustice.
When a photo conveys 1,000 words
A review at Parks made a decision locally, not from Washington. He stated that in 1863 the photograph of a black man on display at Fort Pulaski should be removed.
Two federal officials said the photos would not be defeated at Fort Pulaski and would not be removed from other park service sites.
Elizabeth Peace, a spokesman for the National Park Service, told the Associated Press: “If it is found that interpretation material has been deleted or changed, or has been changed incorrectly, the department should review the situation and take appropriate corrective action.
The man shown in the photo fled the Louisiana Farm to enlist in the Union Army. It became one of the most powerful images of the Civil War, exposing the cruelty of slavery. Smithsonian Association’s National Portrait Gallery.
Still, below March order From the internal sector, the National Historic Park must focus on “a public monument that solely lifts public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, reminding Americans of consistent progress towards a more complete coalition, and an unparalleled record of advances in freedom, prosperity and human prosperity.”
A recent guided tour at Harpers Ferry told a much more complicated story. Brown was a cusp of war that created the “birth of new freedom,” and was maintained as a transformative figure whose bold and deadly assaults inflicted a sense of anti-slavery in the North.
So the park ranger said he spoke to the crowd with a bluff overlooking the location where the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers once collided together like the army of the north and south.
Was John Brown a hero?
Whether Brown is a hero or not is explicitly left to decide. This fierce abolitionist had enough blood in his hands, even before he stepped into Harper’s Ferry. Witnesses say he and his band killed five slavery men and boys in the Kansas massacre, sparked by the hostility of slavery and anti-slavery Kansan.
Wheeler is a descendant of Brown’s Raiders’ first Dangerfield Newby, who died in Harper’s Ferry Fighting.
Newby, a child of a white Ember and a black enslaved woman, was freed in Ohio, and his common law wife, Harriet, and her children remained bound in Virginia. When he joined Brown’s men’s band, he was buying them and saving them to free them.
Newby was shot dead by a musket packed with railroad spikes in a street battle between townspeople and the Raiders. His body was severed. Wheeler said the terrifying scenes with her ancestors and the broader experience of millions of enslaved people are just as part of the American story as the uplifting episodes.
This country needs to know what “really made America.” “Who was the one with these stones and blood on these streets? Harper’s Ferry is the huge thread of that tapestry.”
Is Brown a hero in the eyes of his descendants? “Yes,” Wheeler says. Because he gave up everything, including his life, for a monumental cause. But “He’s not a superhero. He’s a flawed character.”
He’s complicated. Like history itself.
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Associated Press author Russ Bynum in Fort Pulaski, Georgia, Matthew Daly in Washington and Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
