First They Came For National Park Service Staff. Then They Came For the Funds. Then They Came For the Books. Where Will It End?

Today The Washington Post is reporting on some of the books that National Park Service employees have flagged for review owing to their content. This is part of a broader ongoing assessment of interpretive assets ordered by the Interior Department.

Let’s be clear that NPS staff are not volunteering books for review. They are following a directive issued by the Interior Department.

Park service staff have no guidelines to work with as to what might be problematic, but the books that are being flagged deal overwhelmingly with the history and legacy of slavery, the history of indigenous peoples, and other subjects that the Trump administration has targeted as inappropriate.

Since there have been no specific guidelines issued and no one really knows how content will be assessed, park service staff are left guessing as to what should be tapped for review. What this indicates is that the review has nothing to do with historical interpretation, but is rather an attempt to erase history from specific sites.

Bookstore at Antietam National Battlefield (Source: NPS)

The Post article offers a number of examples of how confusing this entire process has become.

Staff also flagged a book at the Washington Monument’s gift shop that discusses the first president as ‘an enslaver’ as a potential violation of Trump’s order.

One park employee reported a book called ‘Wives, Slaves, and Servant Girls: Advertisements for Female Runaways in American Newspapers 1770-1783,’ saying “the park is flagging it out of an abundance of caution.”

Employees at the Charles Pinckney Historic Site in South Carolina reported half a dozen books on slavery, plantation life and Black history. Pinckney was an enslaver who helped draft the U.S. Constitution.

A Junior Ranger children’s booklet at Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, will be reviewed for saying that Lee broke his promise to serve in the U.S. military and instead chose to fight for slavery.

NPS bookstores are important to the integrity of individual sites. These stores feature the latest scholarship surrounding specific subjects, giving visitors the opportunity to deepen their understanding of site-specific subjects.

I make it a point to buy books from as many NPS sites as possible. Earlier this week I purchased Kellie Carter Jackson’s book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance at Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

NPS staff approve items, like books, sold at individual gift shops. The Cooperating Associations that run these stores give back to the NPS a certain percentage of their sales. In the perpetual world of tight budgets, these funds are indispensable and more flexible than government money. Most importantly, these funds are spent largely on programming and media, in other words, interpretive stuff.

The Trump administration’s continuing effort to gut the NPS and remove history that it finds problematic is moving forward unchecked. There isn’t much that we can do, but we are not helpless. One thing people can do to support interpretation and NPS sites in general is to buy their books from these parks gift shops/bookstores.

If you have a park close to you, make the trip and find a reason to purchase a book on a subject that is currently being targeted.

Do it as a statement of resistance.

Do it as a statement that you will not sit idly buy and watch as our history is removed from our most important public historical sites.