The Feds Are Erasing History. America's Top Historian Has Receipts.

On July 4th, America's 250th birthday, the White House published a report on its own website calling the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History "un-American." The report, authored by the Domestic Policy Council, said the museum focuses too much on Black and Brown communities, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ Americans, and accused it of dividing the country.

Marc Stein is the president of the Organization of American Historians, the nation's largest and most prestigious group of professional historians. He visited the museum in March. He also wrote the piece in Time Magazine about the federal assault on history that Grant's been covering on Substack all week.

Grant and Marc go through what's actually in the Smithsonian report, including 1,200 words devoted to attacking land acknowledgements at museums, which the White House labels "anti-white and anti-American." They talk about what it means when a government decides to take history out of the hands of people who study it and replace it with what Marc calls "a singular triumphant mythology." They get into the bicentennial parallel, the last time America tried to rewrite itself at a milestone anniversary, and the specific, concrete work historians are doing right now to save what's being erased before it disappears permanently.

CHAPTERS

0:00 The White House called the Smithsonian un-American. On the 4th of July.

3:43 Meet Marc Stein: president of the Organization of American Historians and author of Bicentennial

4:09 What the "Saving America's History" report actually is: a hit piece published on the White House website

5:15 The ideological agenda: erasing workers, immigrants, women, people of color, and LGBTQ history in favor of "great presidents and military victories"

6:42 1,200 words on land acknowledgements: why the White House calls them "anti-white and anti-American"

9:29 What Marc actually saw when he visited the museum in March: lowriders, Filipino immigrants, the All in the Family set

9:41 "Bizarrely obsessed and delusionally paranoid": what's wrong with the report's methodology

14:00 What's being lost right now: the specific historical materials disappearing from federal archives

18:00 How the administration is using history to decide who belongs in America and who doesn't

22:00 The accountability problem: what we lose when we can't understand where we've been

27:00 What it means to erase LGBTQ history specifically — and what Out History is doing to preserve it

30:43 The bicentennial parallel: Nixon called for open borders, Ford naturalized citizens at Monticello. Now compare that to US 250.

33:38 How we fight back: the "We Want More History" campaign launching September 2026

36:25 Do Americans know this is happening? What Marc's inbox looks like this week.

Organization of American Historians

The Federal Assault On History Report

Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s

OutHistory

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