Across the country, visitors still arrive at national parks expecting to encounter the full sweep of American history, from its triumphs to its deepest injustices. Increasingly, what they find instead are gaps, softened language, or exhibits that have vanished altogether. The National Park Service is not loudly announcing these changes, but a pattern of edits, removals, and new rules is quietly reshaping what the public is allowed to see and remember on federal lands.
Under President Donald Trump, the agency that manages these places has become a frontline arena in a broader political fight over how the United States tells its own story. I see that fight playing out in decisions about slavery, Indigenous dispossession, Japanese incarceration, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change, all filtered through new directives that reward celebratory narratives and sideline anything branded as “negative.”
The policy machinery behind a friendlier past
The clearest signal of this shift is a set of top-down directives that push the National Park Service to strip away what the Trump administration labels disparaging or corrosive. Earlier in 2025, new National Pa signs began appearing that invite visitors to report “negative” content they believe misrepresents American history, effectively deputizing the public to police how hard truths are presented. Soon after, an executive order from President Trump, titled Restoring Truth and to Americ, instructed agencies to remove or rewrite materials that officials judged to be unduly critical of the United States.
That order did not stay abstract for long. By September, Wednesday had become a hard deadline for National Parks across the country to pull any signs, statues, or memorials that the Trump administration concluded disparaged the United States, a mandate that also foreshadowed a review of the Smithsonian museums. At the same time, conservation advocates were warning that more actions by the Trump administration were limiting park staff from discussing or conducting research on our changing climate, folding science into the same campaign to sanitize the story told on public lands.
Erasing people: slavery, civil rights and contested memory
The impact of those directives is most visible where parks once confronted slavery and racial violence directly. At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the Trump administration took down an exhibit on the contradiction between liberty and bondage at the nation’s founding, a move detailed in reporting on how the National Park Service is deleting American history. The same park is now at the center of a lawsuit after Philadelphia sued the Trump administration over the removal of a memorial honoring people enslaved by George Washington, a case that names NPS Acting Director Jessica Bowron and argues that the decision violated both federal law and local commitments to public memory in Philadelphia.
Online, the edits are even quieter. Advocates have documented how The National Park Service quietly edited its Underground Railroad pages, removing Harriet Tubman’s photo and softening language about resistance and federal complicity. Civil rights leaders have framed those changes as part of a broader pattern in which the service, an agency once praised for expanding its storytelling, is now narrowing it to fit political preferences. When I look at these examples together, they read less like isolated edits and more like a coordinated effort to make the nation’s hardest stories harder to find.
Climate, incarceration and LGBTQ+ history pushed to the margins
The same pattern extends beyond slavery. At Manzanar, one of the most prominent sites of Japanese American incarceration, new signs went up asking visitors to report “negative history,” a shift that historians say risks blurring the reality of wartime imprisonment as documented in video from Manzanar. National reporting has also detailed how parks have been instructed to remove signs about climate, slavery and Japanese detention after President Donald Trump issued a directive targeting exhibits on topics like gay rights and climate change. Conservation groups note that while the Trump administration censors stories of slavery, displacement and climate change, countries like Australia and Canada are moving in the opposite direction, expanding the painful histories told in their own protected areas.
At Stonewall National Monument in New York, flags still fly over a site dedicated to LGBTQ+ resistance, but advocates say the park’s webpages have been scrubbed of any mention of the trans community and of scientific discussion of climate impacts, changes that fit with a broader campaign to silence science and queer history. The removal of physical exhibits on public lands began in July 2025 when the administration removed an exhibit at Muir Woods Natio, part of a wider pattern in which, by February 2025, the National Park Service had already altered or deleted language about Indigenous dispossession and climate from multiple sites and that language has not been restored. When I connect these dots, it becomes clear that entire communities and crises are being pushed to the margins of the national story.
More from Morning Overview