Today in America, what we know and understand about what happened in the past is changing in two ways. One is honest and one is dishonest.
I don’t mean that what happened is changing. Time can’t be reversed. Whatever was done was done.
I mean that what we objectively know about what happened and what it means is changing. I also mean that at the same time, what some among us—for their own personal, philosophical, or political reasons—want the rest of us to know and believe about the past is also changing. The difference between what the past actually was and means and what some only want it to appear to be and mean is the difference between history as truth and history as lies.
When reputable scholars write history, they seek the truth. They base what they write on facts uncovered through rigorous research and on what they believe the facts reveal. These two things together—the facts and the interpretation of them—provide the best available picture of what has occurred.
This picture is ever changing or evolving for honest reasons. New methods of research and the discovery of new sources of information provide new facts that add to what we know about the past. Scholars growing up and studying in different times and circumstances are inspired to view facts in broader contexts than their predecessors, ask different questions about those facts, and interpret them in more informed ways, thereby expanding or altering what we know collectively. This has been going on since the days of Herodotus.
For example, during and after the Civil Rights movement, historians with increased awareness of racial discrimination asked new questions about the past, explored previously understudied evidence, and presented a more complete and more accurate picture of race relations in America over time.
Understanding this process of evolving interpretation and knowledge of the past is an entire field of scholarship itself. Called historiography, it is the examination of how history is researched, studied, examined, interpreted, and written, including how the circumstances, issues, and trends of the times when the work is done affect the ways in which the researchers and writers view and present their findings.
This changing history is not lying. It is honest history. It is also sometimes called “revisionist” history, a term that may carry positive or negative connotations depending on who is using it for what purposes. Among legitimate scholars reflecting on the work of their peers, it is largely a positive descriptor.
Regrettably, these days the term has been adopted by the ultra-conservative, white nationalist, fascist-oriented MAGA crowd as a negative characterization of any scholarship with which they disagree and any aspect of the past they prefer to ignore and want the rest of us to forget or never know. They deliberately paint such history as inaccurate, misguided, and distorted.
This is nowhere more evident than in a March 2025 presidential executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” as if the signer possessed any understanding of either truth or sanity. In a recent article in the Journal of American History, Yale University historian David W. Blight accurately characterized the order as “nothing less than a declaration of political war on historians’ profession, training, and integrity, and on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums.”
The executive order seeks to remove “improper ideologies” from exhibitions in Smithsonian museums and ensure that no interpretive content—labels, descriptions, and depictions—there or in any historic parks or any sites administered by the Department of the Interior “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”
It also directs the reinstatement of pre-existing monuments, memorials, and markers that have been changed or removed “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” The order strives to hide negative aspects of the past from future generations and forestall or prevent efforts to correct historical and current injustices against minorities.
Make no mistake. The order came right out of the MAGA Project 2025 presidential transition playbook bearing the title Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. That 900-plus-page document aimed to, among other things, undermine American education and change the presentation of American history to align with the MAGA cult’s own racist, anti-diversity, anti-democratic, fascist ideals, goals, and ambitions.
They want us to believe that slavery was not evil and did not cause the Civil War, to forget our genocidal treatment of Indigenous People for centuries and our incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and to ignore Critical Race Theory and how school desegregation, redlining, voting rights suppression, and other wrongs have denied equality for Black Americans. This goes hand in hand with efforts to ban books and programs that support diversity, equality, and inclusion. This crowd is attempting to change history. They are lying.
This is exceedingly dangerous, not only to particular individuals and groups, but also to our democracy and our country. As Blight points out in citing the work of British historian Richard J. Evans, it is alarmingly similar to things the Nazis did to achieve power in Germany before WWII—not only rewriting history, but also destroying dissent and academic freedom, fanning contempt for “non-Aryans,” and fostering street violence.
These are only some of the harmful things that can happen when people accept lying history. These things happened in Germany between the world wars. They are also happening in the United States today. And if the majority of Americans don’t wake up, pay attention, and reject this type of revisionist history and those who espouse and promote it, increasingly harmful things will follow.
Quoted material in this blog is from David W. Blight, “Historians’ Voices in Times of Peril,” Journal of American History (December 2025), 445-60.
The Herodotus image is from Unsplash.
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