On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal departments to review federal monuments for materials that (among other administration objections) “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”

Actions stemming from this order include the removal of signage at the President’s House portion of Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia that describes the lives of several enslaved people who lived there with George and Martha Washington.

The removals happened in late January 2026; bare concrete panels are now visible where the historical materials used to be. The City of Philadelphia has sued the National Park Service (NPS), pointing out that the city funded a significant portion of the President’s House component of the historic site. Additionally, the cooperative agreement signed between the city and the federal government stipulated that the federal government confer with the city about any potential changes to the site.

On Feb. 9, the counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery filed a joint amicus curia brief in support of the City of Philadelphia’s lawsuit. The counties issued a joint statement, including the following commentary by Bucks County Board of Commissioners Chairwoman Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia:

“Attempts to erase evidence of our history do not heal the stains of the past – quite the opposite, they make us weak and vulnerable to repeating our failures. In Bucks County, with our place in American history firmly rooted, we resist temptation for self-delusion and instead confront our faults head on, resolving always to do better tomorrow than we did yesterday. Only then can we achieve our country’s founding vision of equality for all people.”

Although Trump’s executive order refers to alleged activities during the Biden administration— “pressur[ing of] National Historical Park rangers that their racial identity … dictate how they convey history to visiting Americans”—the President’s House at Independence National Historic Park is the result of a cooperative agreement signed in 2006 by Joyce Wilkerson on behalf of Philadelphia Mayor John Street and the National Park Service under President George W. Bush. As reported by WHYY, Philadelphia spent $3.5 million on the President’s House exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation,” which opened in 2010 (when Barack Obama, not Joseph Biden, was president).

U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia M. Rufe granted a preliminary injunction Feb. 16, ordering the National Park Service to restore the exhibits while the lawsuit proceeds. The Trump administration promptly appealed the ruling.

Two historians—one local, one nationally renowned—spoke with the Press about the historic site and the removal of materials describing the lives of Oney Judge and the other enslaved people in the Washingtons’ household: Austin, Giles, Paris, Moll, Hercules Posey, Richmond, Christopher Sheels and “Postilion Joe” Richardson.

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of more than a dozen books, including the “Don’t Know Much About…” series and the recent “More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War.” He has given lectures around the country, including at the Smithsonian and at the Lehigh County Historical Society, where he presented material from his book “In the Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives.”

The book for which Davis first became known, “Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned,” was “meant as a corrective” to “the version of history that so many of us grew up with, that either erased a lot of history or swept it under the rug.” For example, Davis notes, “a great many people did not know that George Washington was one of the largest enslavers in the country when the Declaration of Independence was adopted.”

Davis is one of many scholars who have worked for the Spast several decades to “eliminate that bedtime story version of history in which George Washington chops down a cherry tree and cannot tell a lie.”

“The real story,” he asserts, “is so much more interesting than the sanitized version that we teach children in elementary school, and most people never get past.”

What distresses him is that so much scholarship over such a long period of time is now being dismantled at the highest level.

“What’s changed now,” he says, ‘is that the administration is trying to erase, remove—take a crowbar to, in the case of Philadelphia—that corrected version of history that historians have struggled mightily in the past few decades to correct.”

This matters, Davis says, in ways that go beyond a single exhibit and touch on our understanding of all of American history.

“It’s dangerous to eradicate this history and attempt to restore that sanitized version,” he explains. “The truth is what really matters, and the truth is so significant to what happened in this country: how the country progressed, how it struggled, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the Civil War, ultimately leading to a civil rights movement that corrected many for the ills of the past, but certainly didn’t remove the stain that slavery created in this country.”

He contends that changes made to the President’s House exhibit and other removals—like the removal of films about the work of women and immigrants in textile mills from Lowell National Historic Park—are of a piece: “It’s really an effort to change the real history of America into something that’s perhaps proud and patriotic, but eliminates the truth.”

The Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society (NCHGS) maintains and operates six sites within the county: the Sigal Museum, the 1753 Bachmann Publick House, the Jacob Nicholas House, the Mixsell Illick House, the Kressler Garden, and the Jane S. Moyer Library and Archives. Megan van Ravenswaay is the executive director of NCHGS; she shared her perspective on the “review” taking place under Trump’s executive order.

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), she explains, is where museum directors look for guidance and best practices. Van Ravenswaay notes that the AAM views museums, including those operated by government entities, “serve the public trust. Interpretation is never neutral,” she continues, explaining that “every exhibition involves choices about what to include, what to emphasize, and how to frame it. That in itself isn’t unethical. In fact, interpretation is part of the work.”

However, the AAM does draw an “ethical line,” that van Ravenswaay says “is crossed when interpretation shifts from scholarship-driven storytelling to image management—especially if well-documented history is minimized, removed, or reframed to present a narrower or more comfortable narrative.

“That’s why the removal of the President’s House materials at Independence National Historical Park raises important questions,” she continues. “For many visitors—myself included, when I first saw it years ago—that site was the first time they learned about Oney Judge and the individuals enslaved in the nation’s first executive household. When those stories are taken down, even temporarily, access to that knowledge shrinks.”

The Lehigh County Historical Society (LCHS) typically does not comment on “how others run their organizations,” according to Executive Director James Higgins. However, he did offer the view that “On the whole, it is not a good idea for government to curate historical information for political or for the purposes of bolstering a particular image.” Higgins additionally remarked that LCHS has “not encountered any evidence of removal of information from sites in either Lehigh County or the Lehigh Valley.”

Like Davis, van Ravenswaay sees a pattern in the materials that are being removed for reevaluation from federally owned historical sites.

“At Stonewall National Monument, the removal of a Pride flag under new federal flag guidance sparked concern because that symbol is deeply tied to the history being interpreted. There have been reports of revisions or removals of interpretive materials in national parks that reference Indigenous displacement, slavery and climate change. Each case is different, but the common thread is the narrowing of what visitors encounter in official public spaces.” (New York City officials, including Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, returned the Pride flag on Feb. 12, days after its removal by the National Park Service.)

Davis asserts that students of history can, and should, grapple with the complexity of American history, and of human beings.

“I can understand,” he says, “that even as Jefferson … was calling the slave trade ‘execrable,’ he possessed more than 100 people, and had a liaison with one of them, and fathered several children by her. This is not disparaging; this is the reality of a human being, and history is about real people, not marble statues.”

Van Ravenswaay expresses a similar trust in the American public’s ability to handle historical facts that may be uncomfortable.

“When the public loses access to fuller historical context,” she asserts, “we lose more than information. We lose opportunities for understanding, empathy, and civic maturity. Museums and historic sites are strongest when they trust the public with complexity.