h3pg Trump Cannot Win His War on History

data de lançamento:2025-04-02 07:02    tempo visitado:73

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On Thursday President Trump issued an executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

In Mr. Trump’s customary bluster, the order bursts with accusations against unnamed people who are presumably my fellow historians and museum curators for our “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history.”

The order’s repeated invocation of the Smithsonian Institution echoes now-familiar right-wing goals outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere: ending the purportedly woke agendas on race and gender, creating “parents’ rights” and school choices and promoting history supposedly aligned with founders’ values.

According to the president, “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then comes that penetrating epithet, the order’s organizing logic: the desire to end the “revisionist movement” carried out by unnamed historians.

I recall that a great historian, Prof. James Horton, used to have a poignant answer to this label: “Would you want your doctors not to be revisionists?” Any field of study must innovate to maintain relevance. The assumption that there is a standard, agreed-upon truth about the country’s past is a fantasy. But when declared by a sitting American president,66jogo.com it becomes a provocation and an insult.

The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.

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Such a scenario would represent a notable degree of ticket-splitting, perpetuating a trend captured by surveys throughout this election cycle. Democratic Senate candidates in a number of swing states, including Arizona and Nevada, have consistently polled ahead of the top of the ticket, especially when President Biden was the party’s standard-bearer. As Ms. Harris’s nomination has made the election more competitive, the gap between her and those down-ballot Democrats has narrowed — but the trend persists in most races in swing states.

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