Federal Workers Given Secret Order as Trump Tears Down Part of the White House; The Daily Beast, October 21, 2025

 Janna Brancolini , The Daily Beast; Federal Workers Given Secret Order as Trump Tears Down Part of the White House

"The Trump administration has ordered federal employees not to share photos of the East Wing of the White House being demolished to make way for the president’s $250 million vanity project. 

The Treasury Department’s headquarters, which are located next door to the East Wing, look out on the construction site for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom Donald Trump is building with private donor funds.

Treasury employees received an email Monday evening telling them not to document the demolition, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote. 

Crews began tearing down the East Wing’s covered entrance on Monday, with dramatic video showing cranes and backhoes smashing up windows and ripping away the façade."

Director of Eisenhower Library in Kansas ousted after refusing to give Trump administration a sword; KCUR, October 2, 2025

  Zane Irwin, KCUR ; Director of Eisenhower Library in Kansas ousted after refusing to give Trump administration a sword

[Kip Currier: Do we want Presidents making gifts of the archival, museum, and library artifacts that belong collectively to the American people?

Do the benefits of the gifting of a sword from the Eisenhower Presidential Library to the King of England outweigh the downsides of giving away an artifact from an historic collection and site?]

[Excerpt]

"The former director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, said on Thursday that he was told to “resign or be fired” from his post after refusing to give the Trump administration a historic sword.

Todd Arrington’s resignation came shortly after Arrington refused to relinquish one of President Eisenhower’s swords from the museum’s collection. President Trump’s administration wanted to give one of the artifacts as a gift to King Charles III on Trump’s most recent state visit to the United Kingdom.

Arrington said his direct superior informed him on Monday evening that he would be asked to resign. The supervisor, who Arrington declined to name, said he was passing down orders from unknown higher-ups."

National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars; The Washington Post, September 16, 2025

 

Jake Spring

 and 

Hannah Natanson

, The Washington Post ; National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars

[Kip Currier: I will be posting commentary about this deeply troubling development by Trump 2.0.]

[Excerpt]

"The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back.

The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans. National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people."

Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past; Library Journal, September 2, 2025

 Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past

"The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.  

Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age. 

Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.

With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope."

CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’; The Guardian, July 15, 2025

  Aaron Gell, The Guardian; CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’

"Trump’s anti-diversity crusade will also have national security repercussions, Weiner predicted. In February, a judge allowed the administration to reassign the team responsible for diversifying the agency. “For decades, the CIA has tried to hire people who don’t look like they just got off the bus from Kansas on the very sound principle that if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Ratcliffe could have delivered.”"

New documentary reveals history of public libraries, features Wisconsin librarians and patrons; Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR), May 5, 2025

AVERY LEA ROGERS, Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR); New documentary reveals history of public libraries, features Wisconsin librarians and patrons

"What began a decade ago as a mission to learn about the history of public libraries around the country is now a documentary airing on PBS. 

Dawn Logsdon is the director of “Free for All: The Public Library.” A lifelong public library patron, she told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that she grew tired of hearing people question the value of public libraries in the internet age. 

“You can only think that way if you haven’t been in a library in about 30 or 40 years,” Logsdon said. “They’re not just a place to store books. They’re a place for people to come together and read, learn, get information, all kinds of things.”...

The documentary is now available to stream on the PBS website or app."

5 Presidential Libraries That Offer Culture, History and ‘Labs of Democracy’; The New York Times, February 13, 2024

Lauren Sloss, The New York Times ; 5 Presidential Libraries That Offer Culture, History and ‘Labs of Democracy’

"As repositories of valuable historical documents and other records, U.S. presidential libraries have long been important destinations for scholars. But you don’t have to be an academic or even a history buff to appreciate these destinations, as many increasingly offer museums, special exhibitions and unique programming — ranging from interactive situation room experiences to musical performances — to the general public.

The first library was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and opened to the public in 1941. Every administration since has created one of its own. (President Hoover, liking what he saw of F.D.R.’s project, established his own retroactively, in 1962.) Fifteen libraries are managed by the Office of Presidential Libraries, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration — the Presidential Libraries Act, passed in 1955, established the system of privately built and federally maintained institutions — and 13 are currently open to visitors. There are additional museums, historic monuments and sites dedicated to other presidents, like the James Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, and some have archival components, like the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.

“President Reagan called the libraries labs of democracy because they explain how decisions are made and how policies are executed,” said Colleen Shogan, the archivist of the United States. “They give us the opportunity to learn about American democracy, and how the government functions.”

With Presidents’ Day fast approaching, consider planning a visit to a presidential library. Here are five to start."

Our History Is Our Protection; American Libraries, November 1, 2023

Tracie D. Hall, American Libraries; Our History Is Our Protection

"Before his own death, another civil rights crusader, US Rep. John Lewis, presciently asserted that in his estimation, access to the internet (and information more broadly) would be the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Lewis’s words demonstrate uncanny foresight. In this moment where disinformation and information disparity have become normalized, many libraries are forced to fight defunding when they should rightfully be advocating for increased funding to provide the growing educational and social services they are being asked to take on.

We are indeed in the midst of a civil rights movement. Libraries are called to face this moment just as we have in times before, with an indefatigable commitment to information access and the unequivocal belief that right of access applies to everyone.

That legacy, that history, is our protection." 

Smithsonian’s Leader Says ‘Museums Have a Social Justice Role to Play’; The New York Times, July 2, 2020

David Gelles, The New York Times; Smithsonian’s Leader Says ‘Museums Have a Social Justice Role to Play’

Lonnie Bunch, who oversees a host of museums and libraries, says the role of cultural institutions is to make people “feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.”

"In your memoir, you recalled when President Trump visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And you shared this detail that the president didn’t want to see anything “difficult.” I feel like that story is emblematic of this broader tendency in American culture where many people, again, simply don’t want to confront the reality of some of the things that have happened in this country. How do we get people to engage with these difficult chapters in our history, especially when the legacy of some of these incidents is still very much with us today?

Americans in some ways want to romanticize history. They want selective history. As the great John Hope Franklin used to say, you need to use African-American history as a corrective, to help people understand the fullness, the complexity, the nuance of their history. I know that’s hard. I remember receiving a letter once that said, “Don’t you understand that America’s greatest strength is its ability to forget?” And there’s something powerful about that. But people are now thirsty to understand history. I hear people all the time saying, “I didn’t know about Juneteenth. Help me understand about the Tulsa riots.”

History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity."

Interview: 'Trump doesn't measure up': Doris Kearns Goodwin on leadership; The Guardian, October 7, 2018

David Smith, The Guardian; Interview: 'Trump doesn't measure up': Doris Kearns Goodwin on leadership

"Now she has delivered a book called Leadership in Turbulent Times. It is not, as the title implies, an opportunistic entry into the ever-expanding Trump canon. She began work on it five years ago, perhaps because a historian’s sixth sense told her leadership, or the lack of it, would become the story behind the story.

The book constructs Goodwin’s own version of Mount Rushmore by examining four presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. She considers what lessons they offer for transformational crisis management, turnaround and visionary leadership, but sugars the pill with telling details and funny anecdotes...

Having made the study of presidents her life’s work, does she think leaders are born or made?

“I would say mostly made,” Goodwin says. “Does the man make the times or the times make the man? It’s a mixture. I think you are born with certain qualities, of intelligence probably, memory and maybe even empathy. Some people, like Lincoln, were born with empathy. It was just a natural part of his temperament, and temperament may be inborn too: the way you look at the world and whether you’re optimistic or you’re pessimistic."