The National Parks Service has edited dozens of webpages since President Trump’s inauguration, seemingly to remove or soften references to slavery, racial division, the civil rights struggle, the Jim Crow era, and other parts of American history, according an analysis by the Washington Post published on Sunday.
For the analysis, the Post compared webpages across websites managed by NPS from late March with earlier versions archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
NPS, an agency of the Department of the Interior, manages 430 properties, over 100 of which are monuments, historic or cultural sites, or national memorials. Among the iconic sites under its purview are the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial in D.C.; the Statue of Liberty in New York; and Fort Sumter in South Carolina, where the Civil War started.
In the Post’s review, a webpage on the Underground Railroad removed a photo and mention of Harriet Tubman, as well as specific mentions to slavery. In its place are a series of US postal stamps of abolitionists, one of which is Tubman, and a more generic description saying that the movement “bridged divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality” and “joined the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution …”
Edits on other pages removed a passage about the legacy of abolitionist John Brown and mentions of systemic racism and historical bias, and altered specific language or images on pages related to the civil rights movement and the Civil War.
It’s not clear whether the changes were made by an internal directive, with some NPS employees telling the Post that Interior Department appointees told NPS officials to identify webpages necessary to be changed. Another NPS employee said that the edits were made unilaterally by lower-level employees out of deference to Trump.
“The National Park Service has been entrusted with preserving local history, celebrating local heritage, safeguarding special places and sharing stories of American experiences,” a spokesperson for NPS told the Post in a statement. “We take this role seriously and can point to many examples of how we tell nuanced and difficult stories about American history.”
This is not the first instance of federal agencies altering historical webpages since Trump returned to office.
Last month, ESPN’s Jeff Passan found that the Department of Defense had removed a webpage about Jackie Robinson’s military service and a webpage celebrating Charles Calvin Rogers, who received the Medal of Honor. It was also reported that DoD removed articles about Navajo code talkers, a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer involved in negotiating the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender in the Civil War, and other webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members.
While a DoD spokesperson initially confirmed the “rapid compllance” that led to the pages’ deletion, the agency reversed course after an uproar. Many of the webpages have since been restored.
“Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others—we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop,” the spokesperson said in an updated statement. “We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like ever other American who has worn the uniform.”
