To the editor: The current White Home report claiming the revered Nationwide Museum of American Historical past engaged in “excessive political activism” when depicting the nation’s previous is one other instance of tried governmental censorship and revisionist historical past (“White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted,” July 6).
As an alternative of celebrating how Individuals of braveness overcame injustices related to slavery, the administration would have you ever imagine America lived as much as its beliefs from the inception of the constitutional republic. Smithsonian students, curators and researchers don’t search to distort and misrepresent the American experiment; they search an trustworthy and illuminating accounting of the struggles all through historical past that required constitutional amendments, a devastating Civil Warfare and an engaged citizenry’s consent to safe elementary rights and freedoms.
With out a recognition of the legislative, judicial, presidential and societal steps taken to guard and protect our democracy, we do a disservice to the work product of those that uncovered our shortcomings and celebrated our hard-fought liberties by measured, distinctive, factual and historic displays. As we study historical past, we shouldn’t be constrained by uncooked politics to understand what makes America so enviable to the world.
The strain marketing campaign in opposition to the Smithsonian must be rejected, particularly as we have fun America’s 250th’s anniversary.
Anthony Arnaud, Laguna Niguel
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To the editor: President Trump loves revising, rebranding and naturally renaming. I’ve had a imaginative and prescient: Coming quickly, let’s all give an ideal spherical of applause for the grand reopening of what’s now the Nationwide Museum of American Propaganda. If we’re going to redact nice parts of our generally messy historical past, we would as properly be trustworthy about it.
John Knox, Costa Mesa
