AASLH rejects the White House’s July 4 report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Contrary to the report’s characterization, NMAH has been steadily widening and deepening the national conversation about American history, expanding its content while maintaining a core narrative that amplifies our country’s remarkable past, illuminates our present, and informs our future.
The report maligns NMAH’s efforts to tell a fuller and more honest story of America—efforts consistent with fieldwide best practices in scholarship and interpretation, as well as AASLH’s mission. NMAH, like thousands of other history organizations across the country, carefully integrates rigorous research, curatorial expertise, multiple perspectives, and audience needs into offerings designed to engage visitors of all backgrounds, beliefs, ages, and geographies. This work should not be defined or undermined by any presidential administration.
The White House report also misrepresents AASLH’s “Reframing History” project, a two-year, deep-dive research effort to understand how Americans think about history and how our field can more effectively explain history’s value. The project offers recommendations for shifting away from highly charged conversations about the past, instead presenting strategies for productive discourse—one that builds a more widely shared conception of what history is, why it matters, and how a whole and accurate understanding of our past better serves us all. “Reframing History” does not, as the report suggests, dismiss the notions of “truth” or “fact,” but rather it offers techniques for replacing fruitless, conceptual disagreements with the good-faith, informed conversations about our past that Americans seek and deserve.
In an age when Americans across the political spectrum agree that the temperature of debate has gotten too hot, NMAH and the broader history community should be commended for striving to build a more broadly shared understanding of our collective past.
