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Blank spaces now exist where a series of panels about enslavement once appeared on the walls of the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site, which honors the home of George Washington and John Adams, is a major landmark that bore artwork and informational signs for more than a decade. But on 22 January, National Park Service (NPS) workers used hand tools to pry off 34 panels to comply with a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. The panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s are now in storage.
The removal is one of several across the nation, as NPS staff aim to conform with Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” issued on 27 March 2025. Public markers, monuments and statues that the Trump administration considers disparaging to past or current Americans have been flagged at more than a dozen parks. Two exhibits at Montana’s Little Bighorn battlefield national monument that discuss Indigenous history and the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been targeted and deemed noncompliant. Additionally, signage about climate change at Muir Woods national monument in California and visitor brochures at Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home national monument in Mississippi that referred to Medgar Evers’s killer as racist were also removed.
Critics of the move say that the federal government’s action in Philadelphia has damaged NPS’s credibility in telling the truth about history. Now, it will be more difficult for the public to access a well-rounded accounting of the nation’s founding, said Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association. “The National Park Service [has] made tremendous strides in recent decades in teaching the facts, the truth about difficult topics like slavery,” Stierli said. “By removing this exhibit and removing signs, not just from this exhibit, but from parks around the country, visitors are going to miss out on the full picture of our nation’s history that deserves to be told in national parks.”
After the panels’ removal (videos at the site were also taken down), the city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against the federal government in the US district court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania to reinstate the exhibit. It also sought an injunction to inhibit any more damage to the site or the panels. On 2 February, Judge Cynthia M Rufe blocked the government from making further changes to the President’s House until further notice.
“Following completion of the required review, the National Park Service is now taking appropriate action in accordance with the Order,” a Department of Interior spokesperson said in an email. “We encourage the City of Philadelphia to focus on getting their jobless rates down and ending their reckless cashless bail policy instead of filing frivolous lawsuits in the hopes of demeaning our brave Founding Fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world – the United States of America.”
As visitors flock to national parks ahead of the US’s 250th birthday on 4 July, Stierli said that he finds the government’s action “so shameful and unfortunate at a time when we should be acknowledging and celebrating our history, while acknowledging the good parts and the bad.”
At NPS, staff have been forced to eliminate historical information to retain their jobs, Stierli said. “This administration is making their jobs harder, further killing the morale of the National Park Service, at a time when their staff is dwindling near historic lows,” Stierli said. “We’re also worried about the storytellers … their world has been rocked too, because essentially, they’re having to reinterpret a narrative, in many cases, against their own will.”
‘There’s always been suppression’
The flagging of signage at Little Bighorn battlefield national monument hits close to home for the historian Dr Leo K Killsback. A Northern Cheyenne descendent of Chief Dull Knife – known for his opposition to the US government’s westward expansion – Killsback completed research and designed panels about the Cheyenne at the monument in 2014. Killsback, a professor of practice at University of Arizona Law, sees the executive order as divisive, in contrast to the monument’s theme, “peace through unity”.
“When done correctly, history is based on facts, supported by evidence, and presented objectively without an agenda or as propaganda. Native voices have been ignored, marginalized or devalued for so long. I think the removal of well-researched facts is desperate and unintelligent and it destroys the hard work of dedicated scholars,” Killsback said.
“American culture is enriched when Native perspectives are acknowledged and fairly represented, especially when presented at a national monument. Erasing history is an affront to the collective progress of human culture and thought. For Indigenous peoples, this kind of erasure is also an assault on our human rights. It is the same form of discrimination and cultural genocide that we endured before and we hoped to never endure again.”
Indigenous and Black American histories have only recently begun to be acknowledged, said Dr Rasul Mowatt, which makes the rewriting of their narratives all the more salient. “The United States has a long history of either no memorialization, late memorialization, contested memorialization or even memorialization removal,” said Mowatt, a sociology, anthropology and natural resources professor and department head at North Carolina State University.
Though the NPS was established in 1916, the first monument dedicated to a Black person wasn’t created until 1943 to honor the inventor and scientist George Washington Carver’s childhood home in Missouri. And since the 1920’s, the federal government has denied many Indigenous nations’ requests to rename Devils Tower national monument in Wyoming, which they consider offensive.
Official histories of the United States, Mowatt said, are a “reflection of what that country would like itself to be seen as by both people inside and outside of it, but there’s conflicting histories amongst different people”.
Placards at national monuments serve as displays of digestible narratives that already truncate history, he added. “The general public doesn’t quite understand the need to have complexity, to have depth, and also to be comfortable in uncomfortable histories,” Mowatt said. “And so in a sense, there’s always been suppression.”
Still, Stierli from the National Parks Conservation Association said that the absence of the panels and videos in Philadelphia has made history more inaccessible to the public. The exhibit’s location near the entrance of the Liberty Bell Center allowed the material to receive a lot of traffic. “There’s a particular power that comes with learning about these stories in the place that they happened, in the place where it was,” Stierli said. “And it’s just a completely different experience than what it would be if you’re reading it on your phone, on a website or in a book.”
