Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
Some of Trumpism’s most notable recent actions confirm what historians have long asserted: historical knowledge matters because historical beliefs and historical forgetting always influence the exercise of state power and the meaning of national identities.
Trump-minded political leaders are therefore trying to erase accurate historical information and to expand their cultural power by constricting the research and teaching in universities and public schools, restricting the recognition of non-white men and women in military institutions, and transforming the historical exhibitions at popular museums.
These assaults on truthful historical knowledge are entangled with the wider attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) throughout American society, because modern efforts to “diversify” the nation’s institutions and civic culture emerged partly from new knowledge about the rich, multiracial complexity of American history.
Members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in a May 1945 parade honoring Joan of Arc where she had been burned at the stake
Blocking Complex Historical Truths in Public Education
Trump-supporting lawmakers like to complain about historical teaching that draws attention to how racism and gender hierarchies permeated American political and social systems throughout the era of chattel slavery, the century of Jim Crow segregation, and the twentieth-century struggles of non-white men and all women to gain equal political and legal rights.
These realities are not easy to discuss, but we cannot truthfully understand our contemporary social world without examining historical facts that often collided with the enduring American ideals and democratic aspirations that appear in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The North Carolina Senate, however, has recently passed Bill 227, which seeks to restrict the historical teaching of “divisive concepts” such as the claim that the United States was “created by members of a particular race or sex” who purposely sought to oppress “members of another race or sex.”
How can a teacher adhere to this requirement (still awaiting approval in the North Carolina House) while explaining how the Constitution allowed the transatlantic slave trade to continue until 1808 and also enhanced the political power of slaveholding states by counting enslaved human beings as 3/5th of a person in each state’s population, even though these people could never gain the right to vote?
How, in fact, could anyone describe (without recognizing purposeful racial oppression) the completely legal slave trade that moved roughly a million enslaved people from the older slave states into newer states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas before 1860? We now know that almost half of all enslaved African Americans–and one out of four enslaved children–were separated from their families, parents, or spouses through well-organized public markets that systematically and legally denied the humanity of a particular race.
This is a painful history, and students from all backgrounds will find it unsettling, but its truthful telling offers an honest pathway for moving beyond historical legacies that have affected public education, family wealth, incarceration patterns, health care, and political power down to our own time. The Trump administration, however, wants to make this history mostly invisible to young people through bans on federal funding for school districts that allegedly undermine “patriotic education” by teaching students about the history of these systemic realities.
Suppressing Diversity in Military History and Military Institutions
Trumpism is also attacking military institutions that emphasize the history of men and women from every social-ethnic-racial community who have served in military campaigns to defend American democracy and constitutional government.
This multicultural support for democracy has been one of America’s greatest political and military strengths because it expresses a broad-based national commitment to defend the “inalienable rights” of the American people “with liberty and justice for all.” The administration’s attack on historical knowledge has nevertheless forced the Defense Department to remove thousands of website images and personal stories that show how Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and women soldiers, sailors, or pilots have served valiantly and creatively in American wars.
Meanwhile, almost 400 books have been “expelled” from the library at the US Naval Academy for discussing people or themes that exemplify the dangers of DEI. The Defense Department spokesman claims that DEI policies and ideas have “weakened” America’s military forces, but there is no data to confirm that the suppression of historical memory strengthens America’s multiracial military personnel or enhances the defense of democracy and free speech.
Americans who faced discrimination in their public or personal lives have steadfastly supported and served the United States during modern wars because they often viewed these conflicts as part of wider campaigns to defend human freedom at home and abroad.
At the height of the Second World War in 1944, for example, the UNC press published a collection of essays entitled What the Negro Wants, which affirmed strong Black support for the global war against fascism. Equally important, however, all the authors supported a “Double V” campaign that linked the international struggle for a military victory over fascism to the struggle for a parallel victory over racist repression within America.
The two campaigns were connected through beliefs and actions that recognized the equal rights of every human being, as Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) wrote in one of the book’s essays. Black Americans, she argued, were “stirred by the clarion call” of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” to oppose “all that the Axis stands for”—and “to make real what the Declaration and Constitution and… the four Freedoms establish.” Black people were serving the cause of “democracy” and “equality” across the whole world, in short, because they believed the war’s goals would also advance the ongoing campaign for equal rights within the United States.
The erasure of America’s diverse military history therefore ignores the essential actions of non-white Americans in past wars, generates new “ideological” distortions of historical truth, and complicates or even jeopardizes future military recruitments.
Americans from all backgrounds will fight to defend freedom, democratic ideals, and inclusive public institutions, but why would the country’s increasingly diverse younger generations want to fight for a nation that deletes diversity from its military history or for leaders who claim that “true” American history is only about people who think and look like themselves?
Black and white photo of two African American women officers inspecting African American women soldiers during WW2. They are all wearing WW2 Military uniforms. Major Charity E. Adams and Captain Mary Kearney inspect members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in England on February 15, 1945. (National Archives)
Purging Historical Truth from Museums
One of President Trump’s executive orders seeks to restore “Truth and Sanity to American History” by removing “anti-American” ideology from the Smithsonian Institution, which includes the “National Museum of African American History and Culture.”
This museum, like other institutions such as the Legacy Museum in Montgomery and the International African American Museum in Charleston, tells the full story of how African Americans and others have been denied their equal rights and freedom, but it also shows how these same groups have constantly advocated America’s most powerful political ideals.
Drawing on the founding documents of America’s democratic government as well as diverse African American statements from the times of Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman to the times of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama, such museums explain why the struggle for legal equality, personal freedom, and political participation makes the history of African Americans (and other disenfranchised people) a continual embodiment of America’s indestructible belief in universal human rights.
Historical museums are thus another vulnerable target for the wider assault on historical knowledge, but political interventions to cancel or erase the factual information in museum exhibits can never change the past or create a more democratic future.
Why History Matters
Although knowledge of historical injustices and achievements helps people understand their present-day society, it also contributes to their future actions and public aspirations.
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, for example, shows visitors how enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas or sold within domestic slave systems that separated family members, forced people to work without pay, and made them constantly vulnerable to life-threatening diseases. This same museum identifies and honors more than 4,000 people who were lynched in the post-emancipation era between 1870 and 1940, when a racist hierarchy could instantly punish even the slightest assertions of Black selfhood or freedom.
Yet the forward-looking narratives at the Legacy Museum (as I saw during a recent visit) also tell “a story of survival, determination, resiliency, and hope” that stresses the democratic ideals and social movements which have pushed America toward “a healthier society.”
One of the most encouraging statements about the value of historical knowledge is etched on a wall of the Legacy Museum, where you can read these words from Mary McLeod Bethune’s essay in that UNC press book from 1944: “If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lashings of slavery,… we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.”
There are countless ways to argue that history matters, but Bethune’s message still speaks forcefully wherever political power and cultural nostalgia have displaced historical truths. “We have seen our dreams frustrated and our hopes broken,” she wrote; and then “we have risen… out of our despair.”
Our own civic tasks thus build on both the grief and optimism that Bethune described. Despite the differences of earlier centuries and now-deceased people, historical knowledge helps us defend truthful education and remember past generations whose “courage and tenacity” changed the conditions of their far more difficult lives.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. He has recently published “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
Past Rhymes With Present Times: Historical Erasures and Historical Truths Chapelboro.com.
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