The Interior Department removed a sign at South Carolina’s Fort Sumter National Monument that described the looming impacts of climate change, including how rising seas could inundate most of the fort’s walls and flood the historic parade ground. The move is part of a broader Trump administration campaign to review and purge content at national parks after President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order told the agency to act against public material that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.
Who Decides What Counts as History
At Fort Sumter, the department told CNN it removed materials it said were not grounded in real science and replaced them with information that is accurate, evidence-based, and aligned with how the world actually works. That is the language of the apparatus when it wants to sound neutral while deciding what visitors are allowed to learn. The order sent the National Park Service into a review process covering exhibits, films, pamphlets and signs, with the agency encouraging visitors to submit comments on signs, including whether they notice any negative messaging about either past or living Americans.
According to an internal NPS database seen by CNN, hundreds of displays were flagged for review. The list reached far beyond one climate sign. It included books for sale about slavery, displays about the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and a film about 19th century mill workers in Massachusetts. The machinery of review was not subtle: items deemed inconsistent with the order could be removed or replaced.
What Gets Removed, What Gets Sanitized
One flagged display recalled abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s killing, with a comment asking, “This document states a ‘mob murders’ an abolitionist. Does this denigrate the murderers?” and suggesting rewording the inscription to “Abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy is murdered for his views.” A panel at a National Park in St. Croix was flagged with a note saying it discusses the slave trade and its connection to the sugar industry which some may find disparaging or inappropriate.
At Grand Teton National Park, the sign below Gustavus Cheyney Doane’s statue at a visitor center was removed. It had asked visitors, “How do we acknowledge the good and bad of a figure?” and pointed out that Doane’s expedition led to the designation of the first national park, but also that he helped lead a massacre of at least 173 members of the Piegan Blackfeet, an act he bragged about throughout his life. Its removal was cited in a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior as one of many changes wrought by the March 2025 executive order.
In California’s Muir Woods National Monument, signs on the contributions of Native Americans and women have been removed, including a note informing visitors that John Muir once referred to indigenous people using racist language in his diaries and ignored the genocide they survived. The removed sign had said, “This contributes to an idea that indigenous people don’t belong in parks.” A new panel on founding father George Mason in Washington, DC, does not mention that he was a slaveowner.
Backlash From Below, Denials From Above
Tom Rodgers, a member of the Blackfeet Nation who is known as One Who Rides His Horse East, said, “We are killing them all over again,” referring to victims of the massacre, which he called one of the most despicable historical experiences for Native Americans. He also said, “I think we’re at a point in our country where people think that if you tell half the truth, you’ve told all the truth, and that in itself, is a lie. It’s Orwellian.” Rodgers, who was part of the effort that renamed Mount Doane in Yellowstone National Park to First Peoples Mountain, accused the administration of attempting to spin Doane’s legacy with the sign removal at Grand Teton. He also said, “We do great damage to ourselves, our own souls when we seek to control a narrative that is not true.”
Elizabeth Villano, a co-creator of the Muir Woods sign, wrote in a LinkedIn post that the administration is erasing half of the narrative in response to the sign changes there. Democrats in the House and Senate sent letters to Interior Department leadership as recently as April asking for further clarity about the agency’s review, and the Interior Department has not responded to letters from Democrats in Congress, according to the offices of Sen. Martin Heinrich and Reps. Sharice Davids and Jared Huffman.
Huffman said at a February hearing, “Actual history is getting whitewashed and censored from national parks and museums. We should honor the 250th anniversary of America by telling the truth.” Alan Spears, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, said, “This notion of needing to restore truth and sanity to American history is one of the largest red herrings in American history. It’s trying to resolve a problem that doesn’t really exist, that never really existed.”
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump is honoring our country’s extraordinary heritage and restoring a sense of national pride, and that the President has put an end to the radical left’s divisive and inaccurate characterization of our nation’s history, which infiltrated our national parks and museums, and is restoring truth and sanity. The Interior Department said experts and local park leaders were consulted as appropriate for removal decisions and argued that the directive strengthens public trust and helps visitors better understand the complexity of America’s story.
Kym Hall, a former National Park Service regional director who retired in October 2024, said she has heard from current agency staff that they are burned out and demoralized after being required to carry out sign changes and removals, adding, “That’s the recurring theme … ‘This isn’t what I signed up for because this isn’t who we are as an organization.’” The department also said the database was edited before being inappropriately and illegally released to the media in ways that misrepresented the status of this effort, and said employees who altered internal records and leaked in an effort to hurt the Trump administration will be held accountable. A source familiar with the database confirmed the accuracy of its contents to CNN and said the changes were only in formatting.
The removals come as America enters a moment replete with opportunity to reflect upon its history, with celebrations to commemorate its 250th birthday throughout this year. The Trump administration’s efforts have drawn backlash from some lawmakers and advocacy groups, including a February lawsuit from a coalition of conservationists and advocates citing the Doane and other sign removals. It accused the administration of mounting a sustained campaign to erase history and undermine science, and the case in Massachusetts is still pending. Last month, a federal court blocked the National Park Service from going forward with plans to replace slavery-related exhibits at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where critics said the new panels sanitized the exhibition, which was erected to recognize individuals enslaved by George Washington.