RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY

White House ^ | 3/26/25 | DJT

[hardspunned]

- Aims to counter a perceived decade-long effort to rewrite U.S. history with a distorted, ideology-driven narrative that portrays America’s founding and achievements negatively.

- Seeks to restore a unified, positive historical narrative emphasizing liberty, individual rights, and progress, rejecting claims of inherent racism or oppression.

- Directs the Vice President, via his role on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to remove "improper ideology" from Smithsonian exhibits, museums, and related facilities.

- Tasks the Vice President and the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress to ensure Smithsonian funding prohibits exhibits that degrade American values or promote divisive ideologies.

- Encourages appointing Smithsonian Board members committed to advancing a celebratory view of American history.

[hardspunned]

I home school three grandchildren. I buy no history texts with copyrights after 1976. No revisionist history for our class. My question for President Trump is where will you get the text books and history teachers who have not been fully indoctrinated? At Thriftbooks I’m lucky to find four of these books at a time.

[Sacajaweau]

I go back to pre WWII. I had a huge collection at one time.

[hardspunned]

Thriftbooks is great! On average I’ll pay $7 of $8 per textbook. The first revisionist history I remember seeing was in the early 70s with the questioning of Hiroshima and all the lies that went along with that questioning.

[BroJoeK]

"I buy no history texts with copyrights after 1976."

When I was in college during the revolutionary 1960s, some but not all of my history professors were self-professed Marxists, and doubtless they were reading and writing books decades before 1976.

Among those was my professor of 19th century American history, who taught that the Civil War was strictly a war over economic domination, nothing else to see here, move along, move along...

I didn't buy it then, and don't buy it today.
So, I don't think 1976 can guarantee accuracy in any historical reports.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

In the 1960s during the unpopular Vietnam War histories were rewritten to make the US look bad in all aspects of life.
I found many facts about slavery and the American Indians fabricated to give a false impression that the tribes got along peacefully with each other, did not scalp, torture, cut to pieces, kill women and children and only did the happy dance with their neighbors.
Anyone who read real history knew this was nonsense even though it was made into movies like Soldier Blue and Little Big Man and in lots of TV shows in the 1970s.
Then came the find at Crow Creek of a massive massacre long before the White Man arrived and an earlier one at Sacred Ridge on Colorado.
Sadly the bogus history is still often seen spewed on the internet.
One University Professor found he could fabricate history from nothing and his students believed him. He was later fired but his nonsense is still often seen on line.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I once had to old history books of the US. One written in 1898 and the other in 1918. Both had different reasons for the cause of the Civil War.
My high school history teacher did not like the history book we used in 1964. She felt it was too biased toward the Union side.

[Colorado Doug]

I home school three grandchildren. I buy no history texts with copyrights after 1976. No revisionist history for our class.

Good for you! That is a great way to be sure of what you are getting. Also proud of you for giving the grandkids a good education. Well done.

[Texas Fossil]

I have a large library also. I seldom get rid of an old book. I have loaned a number of them, they never come back.

smile.

[13Sisters76]

I haven’t read a decent history book since Paul Johnson...
The junk being pushed by these “historians” and “perfessers” is nothing but leftist swill.
It’s like settling for Starbucks when what you want is REAL coffee.

[lastchance]

The malicious compliance will be very strong for this one.

You can bet any reference to slavery or may even the War Between the States to get dustballed. Heck, even Crispus Attacus(sp) might have to find new digs.

[hardspunned]

Thank you. There’s nothing I do in life that brings me more satisfaction.

[hanamizu]

I taught jr high history for about 30 years. As time passed and textbook companies consolidated, picking a textbook became an exercise in finding the least bad.

Looking at the coverage of wars was a quick filter. One textbook featured more coverage of women spies in the Civil War than the generals. Another ‘covered’ the French and Indian War in one paragraph, and judging by photos alone, World War II was primarily fought by black men and women air ferry pilots. That same book basically lumped the Holocaust and Japanese internment in the same lesson.

[Lisbon1940]

We’ve made progress toward color blindness. Crispus was a part of that. I think JD will figure this out.

[aspasia]

I enjoyed studying French history up until the revolution. Cradle of the western civilization.

But US history is a tough one. The themes are tension frought—New England Puritanism and then the Civil War.

The last thing anyone needs is textbook jargon that conceives of US history as a history of government acts. Ugh. I’ve been surprised how AI can get you out of that academic rut—although one has to know how to search. Grok can also be cheeky (a no-no—for the purists).

History to me should include the human sentiments that we glean from titles like “Little House on the Prairie.” And reading original source documents like letters and diaries creates a very memorable picture.

[Sacajaweau]

Mine went back to Colonial Times and they were everywhere..under the couch, filled the closets....mostly related to NYS.

I have bought reprints as some were just too delicate.

I'm 81...I've sold most of them now

[Texas Fossil]

I’m close, am 77.

I’ve never sold a book in my life. I do have some collectables, but they are more important to me than what I would get for them.

[Sacajaweau]

So many of them are on line now. My kids have no interest. So I did what I know was best. Better they go to a history buff than a dealer for 2 cents on the dollar.

You will have to make a decision someday...you can't escape it.

[Texas Fossil]

I will leave that for my daughter or grandson.

My grandson is coming back to Texas this fall to enroll at Texas Tech. I hope to spend time with him to explain a lot of things. He grew up on the East Coast, has no ideal what Texas Freedom really is.

Thanks.

[BroJoeK]

Ruy Dias de Bivar: "I once had to old history books of the US.
One written in 1898 and the other in 1918. "

1898 and 1918 came during the Era of Reunion, Reconciliation & Lost Cause revisionism, when

1. Southern Democrats erected statues to Confederate heroes,
2. The KKK reached its peak membership (circa 5 million),
   including ~20% of KKK members living in northern states,
3. Academics adopted much of the Lost Cause mythology,
4. Northern Democrats helped elect an academic child of the Confederacy as US President -- Woodrow Wilson.

After 1920, and with the replacement of Virginia's Democrat Pres. Wilson with Ohio's Republican Warren Harding, the KKK fell out of favor nationwide, losing over 90% of its members by 1930.
At the same time newer historiography included:

1. Progressives (1920-1950 emphasizing economics),
2. Revisionists & Civil Rights (1940-1990, emphasizing slavery) and
3. Current historiography (1990-present, emphasizing "inclusive" or "intersectional" views)

Yes, these have long since revised the old Lost Cause, Reunion & Reconciliation historiography of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

However, it's also important to remember that throughout the period -- from the Antebellum 1850s through the Progressive 1920s & beyond, there were always distinguished Southern voices opposed to the Lost Cause narrative.
They included people like:

1. MS Sen. Jefferson Davis -- 1858 before the Mississippi Legislature (16 November 1858):
   "Whether by the House or by the People, if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States, you will have presented to you the question of whether you will permit the government to pass into the hands of your avowed and implacable enemies... such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of the Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect."

2. Sen. Jefferson Davis -- 1861: Farewell address to the Senate:
   ’It has been a conviction of pressing necessity, it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi to her present decision.
   She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.’

3. CSA VP Alexander Stephens -- 1861 Cornerstone Speech, but postwar revised his views to downplay slavery's role.

4. CSA Gen. John Hunt Morgan -- 1862 Vidette newspaper
   "...any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar.' "

5. CS Brigadier General Clement Stevens -- 1864:
   'If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight.
   The justification of slavery in the South is the inferiority of the negro.
   If we make him a soldier, we concede the whole question.'

6. Richmond Examiner editor Edward A. Pollard -- 1866 acknowledged slavery's centrality, but by 1868 he "got the memo" and flipped to saying it wasn't so much about slavery.

7. CSA Gen. John S. Moby -- 1894 "I've never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery"

I could go on and on -- there is a long list of distinguished Southerners before, during and after the war, who admitted that slavery was its root cause.