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Coming soon: MAGA's version of American history at national parks • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-07-25
A Minnesota-grown effort to archive national park signs has collected more than 1,000 crowdsourced images after President Trump ordered the removal of content that “disparage[s] Americans” or includes “improper partisan ideology.”
Save Our Signs was created by librarians, historians and data experts at the University of Minnesota. The project calls on people to visit national parks and upload photos of signs to preserve the information before it can be taken down.
Molly Blake, a social sciences librarian at UMN, is one of the co-founders of the project. She described the national park system as “the nation’s largest outdoor history classroom.”
“One thing that I think is especially important is that this information is very deliberately accessible to everyone, and it’s taxpayer funded,” Blake said in an interview with the Reformer. “That made me feel very strongly that this should be preserved somewhere so that people can see it.”
Save Our Signs is working with the Data Rescue Project, an organization that preserves government data sources it considers at risk under the Trump administration.
In an executive order issued in March, Trump directed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to find and remove public monuments, memorials and signs that “inappropriately disparage Americans,” stating that these installations should “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
In response to the order, Burgum directed land management bureaus like the National Park Service to display signs asking the public to report content that meets the criteria of Trump’s order. The effort has not been entirely successful; some visitors are submitting comments asking the parks to cover more of the country’s actual — as opposed to an idealized, fictional — past.
If carried out in full, the order would shield visitors from the truth about a range of historical subjects, including slavery, Jim Crow, Native genocide, environmental degradation and climate change. Indeed, The New York Times reported this week that several signs are under review, and many of them relate to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. Other topics include the government’s treatment of Native Americans and the impacts of climate change.
At least one sign has been altered — an exhibit at Muir Woods National Monument. Rangers there created it to lend historical context to an existing sign in the park. The additions included information about the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people who had originally inhabited the land, as well as information about John Muir — the park’s namesake — who used racist language to describe Native Americans. Pictures from the exhibit are now featured on Save Our Signs’s website.
Although signs on other public lands are also affected by the executive order, the archiving effort is focused on national parks because of their unique responsibility to preserve sites’ history.
“These sites have been really, really carefully curated to tell a complete and complex story of U.S. history. So you have sites that describe moments of progress, places that were really central to the Civil Rights Movement and the abolitionist movement, for example. And then you also have sites that tell really painful parts of American history, including slavery, including the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” Blake said. “And all of those stories are really important to preserve.”
Save Our Signs plans to publish the data it collects by October 13.
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