To the editor: The latest 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 Home report manufacturers Smithsonian management as radical activists who can’t be trusted,” July 6).
As a substitute of celebrating how People of braveness overcame injustices related to slavery, the administration would have you ever consider 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 sincere and illuminating accounting of the struggles all through historical past that required constitutional amendments, a devastating Civil Conflict and an engaged citizenry’s consent to safe basic 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 via measured, distinctive, factual and historic displays. As we look at historical past, we shouldn’t be constrained by uncooked politics to grasp what makes America so enviable to the world.
The stress marketing campaign towards the Smithsonian must be rejected, particularly as we have a good time 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 important 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 typically messy historical past, we would as effectively be sincere about it.
John Knox, Costa Mesa
