Volunteers race to preserve history

A small army works to save cultural treasures amid war against 'woke'

- BY JACK DOLAN

KEN WELSH Design Pics/Universal Images Group TRUMP OFFICIALS denied reports that a photo of an enslaved man's scars had been ordered removed.

A famous Civil War-era photo of an escaped enslaved man who had been savagely whipped. Displays detailing how more than 120,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry were forcibly imprisoned during World War II. Signs describing the effects of climate change on the coast of Maine.

In recent months, a small army of historians, librarians, scientists and other volunteers has fanned out across America’s national parks and museums to photograph and painstakingly archive cultural and intellectual treasures they fear are under threat from President Trump’s war against “woke.”

These volunteers are creating a “citizen's record” of what exists now in case the administration carries out Trump’s orders to scrub public signs and displays of language he and his allies deem too negative about America’s past.

“My deepest, darkest fear,” said Georgetown University history professor Chandra Manning, who helped organize an effort dubbed Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, is that the administration plans to “rewrite and falsify who counts as an American.”

In March, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” arguing that, over the last decade, signs and displays at museums and parks across the country have been distorted by a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history,” replacing facts with liberal ideology.

“Under this historical revision,” he wrote, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”