Submitted by Shannan Mason
April 28, 2025
At a time when the Trump Administration is quickly altering public interpretations of history and removing references to the past on websites and public spaces, it is vital that historians keep track of what is changing. The Early Republic Tracker is dedicated to documenting instances where the federal government is removing facts and stories essential to the public’s understanding American history from public historical sites, museums, websites, and executive agencies.
Where/When did the changes take place?
- National Park Service webpage on patriots of color, sometime between January 28th and February 8th, 2025.
What changed?
- While acknowledging slavery, edits to the page include the removal of mentions of racism across the 17th and 18th centuries. More significantly the following passage and heading from the context portion of the page have been removed: “Why don’t we hear more about this part of the American Revolution? Unfortunately, systemic racism and historical bias have erased or buried many records of Black and Indigenous people who played a prominent role in the founding of the United States.”
Why does the change matter?
- Removing references to systemic racism and historical bias on a page materially alters the interpretive framing of the American Revolution by obscuring structural forces that marginalized Black and Indigenous contributions. By cutting explicit acknowledgment of racism’s role in shaping historical narratives, the edit sanitizes the past and perpetuates a misleading, incomplete public memory of the founding era. This revision undermines attempts to educate the public and reclaim knowledge about Black revolutionaries and their significance to the foundation of the nation by minimizing and normalizing their absence.
Website/location/document where change was made?
Evidence of change?
- Prior version of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20250128102630/https://www.nps.gov/mima/patriotsofcolor.htm
- Washington Post Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/04/06/national-park-service-underground-railroad-history-slavery/
Additional sources?
- For more on Black revolutionary participation see https://www.masshist.org/features/endofslavery/rev_participation
- For context for the impact of systemic bias in history see https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/bias-in-history-textbooks/
- See also Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
