Summary Report of the Civil War 150th Deleted From National Park Service Website

It would be a mistake to think about the concerted effort on the part of the Trump administration to erase historical content from National Park Service websites apart from its larger campaign to overturn or limit the impact of landmark civil rights legislation.

Control what historical content people can access and you can influence how they understand any number of current issues, including race relations. Of course, I have argued and continue to maintain that this is a futile effort, but since these steps are right out of the fascist playbook, they need to be brought to light when warranted.

Earlier this week I was notified, by a NPS employee, that the agency’s summary report Civil War to Civil Rights Commemoration had been deleted from its parent page. The page itself is still live, but the link to the pdf document now takes you to a blank page.

[After doing a little digging I also noticed that the links on an NPS webpage highlighting handbooks, published during the 150th, about Asian & Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Hispanics are, except for one, now inactive.]

The summary report, written by Carol Shively, offers a comprehensive overview of the planning, execution, and assessment of the Civil War 150th commemoration from 2011 to 2015. It is an important piece of the institutional history of the NPS and offers anyone interested in reading it insight into the many programs sponsored across NPS sites durng the 150th.

The attempt to situate the Civil War and civil rights era in the same narrative is made at the very beginning of the document.

One hundred-fifty years ago, competing visions for the country and conflicting definitions of freedom led to a war that threatened the very existence of the United States. The nation was shattered into North and South by blue and gray. Fifty years ago, the streets of American cities ran red with blood again. From 2011-2015, the National Park Service (NPS) joined the rest of the country in commemorating these major events that changed the nation forever–and continue to challenge it today. To honor these sacrifices, among many other special events, 40,000 people marched across the killing fields of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, and 50,000 marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. (6)

John Rudy, an NPS ranger and interpretive trainer with the Interpretive Development Program in Harpers Ferry offered this very helpful overview of how the Civil War 150th came together:

The final key to a shift in communication style was the realization by the broader National Park Service community that the Civil War’s sesquicentennial celebration came at the same moment as the semicentennial of the American civil rights movement. This was not immediately clear in 2009, as then-National Capital Regional (NCR) Director Peggy O’Dell led a team to define a vision for the commemoration. The initial vision was for the Park Service to serve as a purveyor of facts and figures. It intended for rangers and staff to primarily “serve as a respected, reliable source of diverse perspectives on the war and its lasting effects.” The efforts to move to a social understanding of Civil War landscapes, although grossly needed, was still almost wholly focused in retrofitting a social past into the story of military past, instead of looking to help visitors confront the stormy present.

This vision shifted radically in the summer of 2011, even after the commemoration had begun. In a draft of a new service-wide interpretive plan, pushing National Parks Service sites and units to integrate the Civil War and the civil rights struggles into one larger, more meaningful narrative, the goal began to take shape with distinct clarity. The purpose of the combined commemoration should not simply be educational and transfer factual information from the ranger to the audience. Instead, parks had the distinct responsibility to help visitors “commemorate America’s greatest historic events beginning with the Civil War,” not as events isolated in time, but “as a point of departure for an examination and exploration of the on-going quest for legal and social equality for all Americans, the still-vigorous debate over the appropriate reach of the federal government, and the never ending effort to reconcile differing cultural values held under a single national flag.” The commemoration should be just as much about the present, the National Park Service’s national and regional leadership was beginning to realize, as it was about the past. (63)

It isn’t difficult to appreciate why a report such as this would be considered problematic by the Trump administration and its DOGE sycophants, who are on the lookout for anything that appears to violate its DEI protocols.

Thankfully, this document is still available at NPShistory.com—an independent website that has archived dozens of NPS reports and other documents. It’s a real treasure trove of resources for anyone interested in public history and the story of the NPS.

I will leave it to you to read it and decide whether there is anything problematic, dangerous or unpatriotic contained in it. You may not agree with every program and speaker that was featured during the commemoration, but that is a far cry from demonizing the work of the NPS and its employees.

It is important to recognize, that the Trump administration’s interest in history extends only so far as it can solidify and justify its hold on power and the radical policies that it is attempting to enact, especially in its determination to turn back the clock to the racial status quo of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Trump administration can go ahead and make the case for doing so, but it shouldn’t get to do it by distorting the past and hiding from the American people just how far we’ve come and what it took to get here.

This is our history. It belongs to all of us.