Un-making history

Last week in this space, we told you about the bigly pushback against Trump’s attempt to white-wash American history at national parks. In trying to blot out the bad parts, in 2025 Trump announced an executive order titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" and directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to ensure monuments, memorials, statues and markers "do not contain descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."

In order to do this, park goers were asked to use a QR code to rat out any incriminating historical facts they deemed inconvenient. But the survey didn’t go quite the way Burgum or Trump envisioned, with a large majority of the 37,500 respondents objecting to the sanitizing of American history or defending public parks.

Now it seems a federal judge has sided with them, too.

This week, District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore signs and exhibits at national park sites that were removed under the executive order within three weeks, accusing the administration of attempting to "rewrite the nation's history with a white-out pen."

Conservation and historical groups sued the Interior Department as it targeted hundreds of exhibits on climate change, civil rights and diverse communities.

According to a report by KUNC, some of the items that Trump removed in the Mountain West include:

• Interpretive materials related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change from Glacier National Park

• A sign at Grand Teton National Park explaining how Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a key member of an early Yellowstone expedition, had participated in a massacre of Native Americans

• Displays at the Grand Canyon sharing how the federal government claimed tribal land to create the park

• A sign at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona that included an image of a visitor holding a Pride flag

Items at six other park sites in the Mountain West were flagged for removal, including a sign at Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site in Colorado about a family's ownership of enslaved people.

In a statement, the Interior Department said the order came from a Biden-appointed judge and that it's looking to appeal.