If you are looking for the front lines in the struggle over our democracy, you can find them in the executive orders which brazenly seize control of history, among other things, in the name of American greatness.
If you haven’t read those EOs, it’s your civic duty to do so. Because if you want to grasp how high the stakes are and ready yourself for the battles ahead, you have to acknowledge how utterly entwined the future of our democratic polity is with the fate of history in the US today.
During the period between March and August of this year, the current administration issued a number of EOs that take direct aim at the teaching, content, and memorializing of the American past, with particular attention to those subjects which are now deemed “NSFW” in classrooms from elementary school through university.
There are also EOs which indirectly disqualify or ignore longstanding histories of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and sexual freedom in order to make way for MAGA policies which turn the clock back decades or more, eroding the cultural, economic, social, and political foundations of American democracy.
Will we come to see an executive order that declares a crime emergency for History capital H for failing to promote narratives of America the Beautiful not just as absolute truth and sanity but as the highest form of muscular Christian patriotism?
Take for example, the March 27, 2025 EO, which declared that an insane, untruthful version of the past has beset narratives of American history through the promotion of race as something other than a biological fact in sculptures at the Smithsonian and through the public memorials which decry white supremacy rather than celebrating it.
Or the April 8, 2025 EO, which effectively sidelines three decades and more of historical research on the environmental and human costs of American fossil fuel production in order to champion US coal as “beautiful,” “abundant,” useable “in any weather condition,” and worth a trillion dollars.
Or the EO issued two weeks later which rewrites history and declares that accreditation agencies in the higher education space are nothing more or less than fruit from the poisoned diversity, equity, and inclusion tree and hence constitute abuse of governance standards in violation of federal law.
Issued on that same day is the EO which conveniently ignores histories of racial discrimination at the site of education, housing, employment, and other civic opportunities, declaring that all policies that flow therefrom are rendered null and void in the interests of restoring meritocracy.
Of particular note, as debates about AI rage their way across the globe, is the EO of July 23, 2025, which suggests that historical knowledge of and teaching about American racism and the oppression of people of color have infiltrated AI to such a degree that “one major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures—including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings—when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy [and] another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races.”
As is evident from that quote, these EOs have to be read to be believed.
Yet we cannot afford to look away.
As recently as August 7, the administration issued an EO that deemed activities (like history) that address racism, challenge the sex binary in humans, or debate the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic promote “anti-American values.”
Ominously for colleges and universities, the EO in which that declaration is embedded is entitled “Improving Oversight of Federal Grant Making.” Which means that knowledge of the kind produced by historians that is deemed a form of anti-Americanism may be part of a litmus test for the flow of federal grant dollars to STEM and other fields.
To be sure, histories of the African American experience, gender difference and equity, and social justice politics or movements have been under threat at the state level for years.
The promulgation of bills outlawing the teaching of everything from slavery to socialism in over half the states since 2022 has put history under a metaphorical house arrest.
But the EOs of 2025 so far are heading toward the quasi-legal equivalent of suspending habeas corpus for the practice of professional history--i.e., taking it into federal custody with no credible explanation of the arbitrary detention of its research and teaching in anything like a court of law.
And although it may not appear to be related, the declaration of “a crime emergency” authorizing the executive authority to militarize the DC police force should prompt us to think about the relationship between “history detained” and the specter of martial law.
And it looks like Chicago is next.
Will we come to see an executive order that declares a crime emergency for History capital H for failing to promote narratives of America the Beautiful not just as absolute truth and sanity but as the highest form of muscular Christian patriotism?
One that will subject history in America to the will and whim of the Department of Justice and Homeland Security?
Surely this metaphor can only work in the theater of the absurd. Or in the political theater of authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, the content and teaching of history are being caught up in the current logics of what warrants a declaration of emergency.
As the accumulation of executive orders since the inauguration manifestly shows, the fate of history in America is a bellwether for the future of democracy itself. The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said it best:
...all that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history... Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.
If Baldwin is right, it’s because history is neither red or blue; nor is it only about the past itself. History at its most democratizing is a provocation to reckon with the relationship between the past we’ve lived and the futures we want.
Sound the alarm: Martial law may well be next for history. And if it comes, it won’t stop at metaphor.
