‘We Live in a Country With an Unpredictable Past’

“We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” This was a saying among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next.

Now Americans, too, live in a country with an unpredictable past. Two months into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in which he directed officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A very incomplete list of things that have happened since that order was issued: The National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide,........

© The New York Times