Should History Be Patriotic?

There are three types of people: conservatives, liberals, and historians.

This past week, a judge ruled that the Trump administration’s attempt to rewrite American history is illegal.[1] At national museums, national parks, and in historic landmarks, the administration has been attempting to remove references to slavery, climate change, queer activism, and other aspects of American history that it believes fostered a “woke” agenda. Opponents insisted that removing such references represents a whitewashing of the past. The tension over how to present our past is not new. It began long before Trump entered the White House.

One especially ferocious debate erupted in 1994, as the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum planned a commemoration of the WWII’s end. Curators of a new exhibit wanted to restore the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and present information about both the Americans who participated in the bombing campaign and the Japanese people who lost their lives. One small part of the exhibit included a child’s lunchbox, visibly scorched by the bomb. It was meant to represent the many children who died. Some veterans’ groups vehemently objected to the entire attempt to show both sides. They did not want any focus on Japanese deaths as it might cause Americans to question the bomb’s use.

The veterans’ groups hired a public relations firm to mobilize both the public and Congress to quash the plans. The curators thought they had crafted a balanced, historically accurate depiction of events, but opponents called the exhibit “politically correct.” In the end, the museum was compelled to scrap any mention of Japanese suffering, and the chief curator resigned.[2]

The resolution left everyone unsatisfied. Veterans were angered, peace activists protested, and the American people lost a chance for thoughtful engagement with their past. But as one curator later observed, maybe people didn’t really want thoughtful engagement. They wanted history to make them feel good.

Some time ago, I assigned a book in a history class about how Nazi legal theorists crafted German racial laws by studying American racial laws, particularly those in southern states. One student could not understand why anyone would even write such a book. All it did, he claimed, was to make you feel bad. He was partly correct: the book probably did make many readers feel bad, but that is not all it did. It also spotlighted the cruelty of America’s segregation, while illuminating its wider impact beyond the nation. And it had the virtue of being true.

If the purpose of history should be to make us feel good, then Germans must never learn about the Holocaust. Japanese people must be left ignorant of the rape of Nanjing. And Americans must be shielded from knowledge of the bomb.

I sometimes think there are three types of people: conservatives, liberals, and historians. Some conservatives want history to highlight only the sunny side of our past. In contrast, some liberals seem to revel in exposing the darkest dimensions of our deeds. Honest historians just want to know the truth, whatever it may be. We want to know what happened and why. And applied historians, those in the subfield that seeks guidance from history, want to use that knowledge to help forge wiser judgments in future.

No country can find its way to wisdom unless there is truth. And truth depends on knowledge of facts: not alternative facts, but concrete, verifiable facts. Not just the facts we like, the ones that make us feel good, but all the facts we can find, regardless of how they make us feel.

Studying history is an emotional experience. When we learn about America’s attacks that harm innocent civilian children, such as with napalm in Vietnam or on apartment buildings in Yemen just last year,[3] it can make us feel ashamed. And when we learn of America’s heroic airlift over West Berlin,[4] it can make us flush with pride. But focusing solely on one side and not the other prevents a thoughtful understanding of all that we can do. We need to know the noble acts we’ve done in order to inspire us to do more. And we must also know of the awful deeds we’ve done so that we can pressure our leaders not to repeat them.

Politicizing the past only saps our future. Ideologues on the Left and Right must be stopped from shaping our historical awareness. If we let them leave us ignorant, we will always live as fools.

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[1] Trump’s changes to history at national parks must be undone, judge rules - CBS News

[2] One quick summary of this episode is here: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/controversy-over-enola-gay-exhibition. For a deeper dive into the affair, see Lifton, Robert J & Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. New York: Avon Books, 1996.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/18/trump-yemen-bombings-killed-civilians-us-attacks-analysis.

[4] For an engaging account of the Berlin Airlift, see Cherny, Andrei. The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008.

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