By Amelia Palacios, Molly Blake, Jenny McBurney and Kirsten Delegard; co-founders of Save Our Indicators
On the nook of Sixth and Market streets in Philadelphia sits a contested website on the coronary heart of the origin story People inform each other. Practically 20 years in the past, this explicit Nationwide Park Service (NPS) website was the point of interest for heated debates concerning the goal of historical past and nationwide id. In the present day, these debates have resurfaced with dire penalties.
This nook in Philadelphia is residence to the positioning of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, and the buried basis of the primary presidential mansion. Collectively, these websites make up Independence Nationwide Historic Park.
In 2002, an activist group referred to as the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) organized for almost a decade to demand that Independence NHP inform the complete story of the 9 people George Washington enslaved at our nation’s first “White Home”. On account of this years’ lengthy advocacy and public engagement, in 2010, the Nationwide Park Service opened an exhibit referred to as The President’s Home: Freedom and Slavery and the Making of a New Nation.
The President’s Home Website is the primary federally owned property to function a slave memorial. It was hailed as a tough fought victory for activists searching for public acknowledgement of the historical past of slavery and a option to honor the folks held in bondage.
The exhibit invited guests to grapple with the prevalence and violence of slavery and a central paradox: the position slavery performed in a nation based on the beliefs of liberty and freedom. Every wall included interpretive panels that instructed of the intertwined lives of the 9 people enslaved at that website by the nation’s first president.
In the present day, guests to the President’s Home will as an alternative discover ghostly outlines of exhibit panels and empty mounting {hardware} on brick partitions. These spectral traces sit alongside screens enjoying historic re-enactments with no context. Chain-linked fences and warning tape barricade parts of the positioning, with indicators stating: “Preservation work in course of.”
This Nationwide Park Service website is one amongst 12 which have fallen sufferer to the Trump administration’s effort to revive “fact and sanity” to American historical past.
“Restoring Reality and Sanity to American Historical past” is the title of an effort introduced on March twenty seventh 2025 through Government Order 14253. It instructs the Secretary of the Inside, who oversees the Nationwide Park Service, to “be certain that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or related properties inside the Division of the Inside’s jurisdiction don’t comprise descriptions, depictions, or different content material that inappropriately disparage People previous or dwelling.”
This order, and the following Secretarial Order 3431 of the identical title, despatched park staff and most of the people on a hunt by 433 NPS websites for instructional supplies that “inappropriately disparage” People. This quest to root out “corrosive ideology” has flagged movies, brochures, and exhibit texts, indicators and wayfinders for evaluate. Some, just like the indicators on the President’s Home Website, have been outright eliminated or altered.
The Nationwide Park Service is charged with not solely stewarding and defending our nation’s most traditionally, culturally, and scientifically vital or susceptible websites, but additionally with offering correct interpretation of those websites to the general public. To satisfy this mandate, historians and signal designers meticulously analysis and craft interpretive supplies for the Park Service. These supplies are place-based repositories of information, used to coach folks of all ages about historical past and the pure world present in our parks. With over 300 million guests a yr, NPS is the nation’s largest outside classroom. The Nationwide Park Service, and the supplies housed there, make up the folks’s college.
The Trump administration is on a marketing campaign of information destruction. By focusing on NPS and its interpretive supplies, this administration is gutting a vital authorities company dedicated to stewarding our nationwide reminiscence.
People have launched multi-faceted and decentralized efforts to fight this censorship. Whereas some organizations have filed lawsuits and lobbied Congress, we have now pulled on the sources of the library world to faucet into the deep public affection for the Nationwide Parks and protect these focused supplies. We introduced collectively librarians and public historians with information and geospatial consultants to create Save Our Indicators (SOS), which invitations members of the general public to go to NPS websites and take photographs of interpretive indicators.
Since we launched our venture in July 2025, we have now acquired over 15,000 photographs from 422 nationwide park websites. We now have used these submissions to create a folks’s archive which accommodates photographs of standard NPS indicators, alongside documentation of censorship (comparable to photographs of clean areas the place indicators was once), and of inventive resistance (comparable to photographs of handwritten indicators group members posted on the President’s Home website saying “Historical past is actual” and “Study ALL historical past.”)
We additionally preserve an inventory of indicators eliminated or altered to trace what supplies have really been censored. This SOS Removing Tracker has been utilized by journalists, legal professionals, and group advocates because the definitive supply for a complete checklist of censored indicators within the Nationwide Parks.
In March 2026, an inner Division of Inside dataset itemizing NPS supplies flagged for elimination was leaked to the general public. To assist folks perceive this information, we created a Storymap. We hope that folks can use this visualization together with our SOS Archive to determine still-unphotographed indicators particularly in danger for elimination.
This venture builds on a lineage of place-based public historical past and crowdsourcing initiatives that carry the general public into the analysis course of. Extra particularly, SOS is rooted within the methodologies of Mapping Prejudice, a crowdsourced analysis venture based mostly on the College of Minnesota Libraries that mobilizes group members to determine and map racial covenants, which have been clauses inserted into property information throughout the early to mid twentieth century that barred individuals who weren’t white from proudly owning or occupying the land. Mapping Prejudice works with group members to unearth the willfully hidden historical past of how structural racism formed the constructed surroundings in america.
Such beforehand obscured histories, just like the follow of racial covenants or the lives of the 9 people enslaved by George Washington, are being categorically labeled as “disparaging” or “corrosive” by an administration that would like to maintain some info hidden from public view. Save Our Indicators is making an attempt to maintain these unearthed histories seen–stopping them from being buried once more.
As america begins to have fun the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration has sought to show again the clock on such historic restoration work. The truth is, Independence Nationwide Historic Park known as out particularly in each the Government Order and Secretarial Order for “renovations” in time for the America250 celebrations.
In April, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on such proposed “renovations” when NPS printed to the President’s Home Website web site the brand new proposed interpretive indicators supposed to interchange the unique indicators at this website.
In comparison with the unique displays, which point out the 9 enslaved people in virtually each panel, the proposed panels not often point out them. The Trump administration’s proposed alternative panels additional reduce the horrors of slavery, omitting a lot of the data from the unique exhibit.
This blatant omission of factual historical past is disturbing to witness. Maybe most annoying, was the subtlety of the content material adjustments. So when two of our workforce members had the chance to attend the Group of American Historians’ convention in Philadelphia in mid April, we created a visualization instrument to assist folks see the gravity of those proposed adjustments. We printed pamphlets to promote the side-by-side visualization instrument and handed them out to folks we met whereas we visited the President’s Home website.
We spoke to group members who stored vigil on the website. One involved citizen shared how he has been going to the President’s Home each weekend, posting clean paper on the partitions the place the interpretive panels as soon as hung. Whereas we watched, he affixed markers to the partitions with painters tape, inviting park guests to share their ideas.
He famous that the rangers principally flip a blind eye in the direction of the group responses, solely eradicating the indicators after a number of days. However he and different group members have been questioning if that perspective will change because the 250th anniversary nears.
A courtroom ruling on the finish of final week directed the federal authorities to re-install all censored indicators earlier than the 250th celebrations this July 4th, offering what we hope to be a serious victory within the battle in opposition to this censorship. But the Division of Inside has already filed an attraction, and we have now not seen reviews of the unique indicators reinstalled on the President’s Home Website.
As this battle continues, the Save Our Indicators workforce hopes that these public conversations about historiography and what’s worthy of remembrance are solely simply starting.
What we select to recollect shapes who we’re and who we consider we might be–individually and as a nation. With every photograph submitted to the folks’s archive of Nationwide Park indicators, and with every printed out panel taped to clean partitions, People are asserting what nationwide narratives they wish to memorialize and enter into the nationwide consciousness. And so they need correct historical past that’s wealthy, nuanced and stuffed with the failures, the glories and all the things in between.
Save our indicators is a venture based mostly out of the College of Minnesota Library. You possibly can study extra about it right here.
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