"The president may not like how the museum and research institution tells the American story — but Americans do."
"A Native American family visiting the Smithsonian Institution in the middle of the last century would have found its story told alongside rocks and fossils at the National Museum of Natural History, where the original Americans were an object of anthropological study, not subjects or actors with a culture, a past, and a unique understanding of the promise and hypocrisy of the larger story of America.
Then, in 1964, the Smithsonian opened a new franchise — the Museum of History and Technology, which eventually became the National Museum of American History — and welcomed a new leader, S. Dillon Ripley, whose 20-year tenure as secretary was transformative.
“Ripley comes in, and he immediately sees the problem,” says Professor William Walker of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York at Oneonta. The Smithsonian was celebrating American accomplishment in a designated museum of American history, yet the other stories of America — darker stories of exclusion, enslavement, betrayal and dispossession — were either footnotes to that history or not told at all. Walker, who has written about the history of the Smithsonian, credits Ripley with beginning a conversation that would change the institution and how American history is understood throughout the country.
That soul-searching ultimately led to the opening, decades later, of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. The conversation continues today, with plans for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino."
Philip Kennicott reports a column in the Washington Post April 10, 2025.
SEE ALSO:
"‘President Is Obligated’: Legal Experts Slam Trump Order Gutting Wilson Center, Others" (Roll Call)
"Trump Moves To Gut Several Agencies, Targeting Voice Of America, Libraries" (Washington Post)
"Trump Says He’s Erasing ‘Shame.’ Critics Say He’s Hiding Historic Truths." (Washington Post)
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