Firing at an Empty Target

First posted on Substack at https://tadstoermer.substack.com

I just spent five weeks going back and forth across America, talking with people every day about resistance history, about what public history means in a country whose government is actively rewriting its own, about tyranny and what our past says about living under it and getting out from under it. Bookstores, lecture halls, film studios, pubs, sidewalks. A few thousand conversations, give or take.

Not one person mentioned the Smithsonian.

Keep that in mind as you read the coverage of Friday’s executive order, in which Trump directed the National Park Service to install warning signs on the sidewalks outside the National Museum of American History, alerting visitors that the exhibits inside contain “inaccurate information” and pointing them to a mysterious location where an accurate version supposedly lives. The order grows out of the White House’s 162-page July 4 report accusing the museum of ideological capture, which itself grew out of the March 2025 executive order on restoring “truth and sanity” to American history. 

The gatekeepers responded on schedule and predictably. The American Historical Association, which thinks public history is a discussion about memory theory in a seminar room and practicing it is an Instagram post no one sees, defended the independence of the museum and the integrity of the craft, for the third time in sixteen months. The Organization of American Historians asked who has the authority to determine how American history is told. Online commentators — most of them academic historians in their usual register of high dudgeon — split between alarm and mockery. But the mockery at least had a hidden point: Trump can only touch the sidewalk because he can’t touch what’s inside the museum.

Almost everybody in this fight, on every side, is firing at an empty target. What I am not saying is that what the National Museum of American History puts on its walls doesn’t matter. Its work representing this country’s complexity is real, and Lonnie Bunch and Anthea Hartig are worth defending. The more important question, though, is how it matters and for whom. But most people involved are answering inside a frame that stopped describing the world a long time ago.

Here is that frame, which is a cornerstone of every museum studies program selling itself to students, including my own: Museums sit at the center of public memory. What a national museum says about the past shapes what the nation believes about itself. Therefore, the fight over the museum is a national (some might say nationalist) fight over history as narrative. It’s a coherent theory, and it was even true once. In a single twelve-month stretch across 1994 and 1995, an exhibit script about the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum and a staged estate auction of enslaved people at Colonial Williamsburg each ignited genuine national arguments about memory. I know the second one’s legacy from the inside; I spent four years at Williamsburg working in the interpretive world that reenactment made possible.

Those controversies mattered because the country still ran on a centralized information ecosystem. Three television networks, respected newsweeklies, the morning paper. When thought leaders decided a museum fight was the story, everyone had the same argument at the same time. Museums held their position in public memory the same way CBS and This Week with David Brinkley held their audience, and they lost it the same way.

The numbers tell the story. In 2023, the National Museum of American History drew about 2.1 million visits (it doesn’t count unique visitors, so visits include people who reenter the museum, even staff), still short of what it drew before the pandemic. Its website drew 10.7 million visits that same year to its online exhibits and other digital resources. And we know who still walks through the physical doors. The people who visit history museums frequently, the core constituency, are 83 percent white in a country that is 57 percent white, and generally carry college degrees at more than twice the national rate. Essentially, museum visitors look strikingly like an AHA annual meeting, minus the anxious PhD candidates hoping for a job. Which means the battle over what the wall text says is largely fought on behalf of a general public that engages the past somewhere else.

The Smithsonian, of course, knows all that. Much of its best work, and its best restorative history work, has been in actual public history practice, going to where people are rather than requiring them to come to a building on Constitution Avenue. That is what public history is. It has never been the building.

You can watch the museum doing that work right now, if you know where to look. The NMAH YouTube channel has been quietly putting out genuinely good public history: recent posts on menstrual history, a series called Latinas Talk Latinas. The channel describes its mission as “empowering people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.” Something close to that sentence, as it happens, is the centerpiece of the White House’s case against the museum. The report devotes a whole section to the scandal of it, the removal of “American history” from the mission statement in favor of complexity and compassion.

But read it as a public historian and it’s simply a real mission statement, a description of what the discipline actually does when it’s done right. The channel doing that work has 36,000 subscribers. My own YouTube channel, one public historian working without a federal appropriation, has 69,000. That gap is not evidence that nobody wants what the museum makes. It’s evidence of an audience the Smithsonian hasn’t even begun to reach, an audience I can tell you exists because I talk with it every day. And that’s just one platform.

And the museum once built something better than a channel, something that can drive the work a channel does: the Center for Restorative History. It spent six years partnering with communities to do exactly this work, helping define restorative history as a theory, a method, and a practice along the way. It helped the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, tell the story of a Till historical marker carrying 317 bullet holes. It ran the only internship program in the country for alumni of a prison education partnership. It launched the Movement for Black Lives Collecting Initiative — almost literally a resistance history project — to protect and project the experience of Black organizing and protest since 2012. And, crucially, its Research and Action Team was working toward a muscular, direct approach to activist public history, one that takes recovered memory and makes it work in people’s lives. For a field that too often takes the safer route of reaction, the center was reframing what public history could be if oriented toward action.

I pay attention to this field for a living, my own method owes the center a debt, and I did not notice something until this week: the center was “sunsetted” on February 4, 2026. Nearly six months into the White House’s review, five months before the report attacking the museum’s mission. The museum’s website announced it in three sentences, with a clear statement about what was lost: 

Across its six-year history, the Center documented stories and collected histories from communities that too often have gone unseen.

I’m sure the official account is that it was always meant to be temporary, and the private grant funding makes that account available. But not one news outlet covered it. No professional organization issued a statement. Not the NCPH. Not the AASLH. Signs on a sidewalk produce wall-to-wall coverage and a chorus of national response. The end of the museum’s actual restorative history infrastructure produced nothing.

And when the White House goes after the story directly, the record shows what happens. In January, workers with crowbars stripped every slavery interpretation panel from the President’s House site in Philadelphia, the only federal site that told the story of the nine people George and Martha Washington kept enslaved in the executive mansion there. In July, after a Third Circuit ruling, new panels went up that acknowledge slavery’s evil while narrating its end as the completion of the founders’ work. The Washington on those panels is a tortured man, benevolent, privately doubting, an abolitionist trapped by his circumstances. And plenty of academic historians will let that stand, because it’s what a good part of the profession already says about him, just in a softer register. The leadership at Mount Vernon won’t say a word against it because the new panels ask visitors to accept Washington’s account of himself as objective reality, which is what they sell. The professional organizations, so far, have contested the process by which the panels went up and rather little about what they say.

But beyond the site, the result has been the opposite of erasure and acceptance. There are public historians in Philadelphia and online who have made it their mission to tell the honest history of that house. Ona Judge, the twenty-two-year-old woman who walked out of it in 1796 while the Washingtons sat at dinner, is better known today than at any point since her own lifetime. Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught has found a new public, as it should. What's front and center now because of them is the fact that Washington chose, actively and repeatedly, to exploit the people he claimed to agonize over.

I am not calling any of that a blessing in disguise. Philadelphians built that memorial over decades and watched it come down in an afternoon. But the history’s recovery, and the growth of public engagement with it, tells you where public history actually lives, and it lives in a place Trump and his acolytes cannot reach with a crowbar or a sign.

So what are the signs in front of the Smithsonian really for? For that, we have to attend to who consulted on the report behind them: Matthew Taylor, senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Commission of Fine Arts appointee, overseer of the Garden of American Heroes. Taylor is a conceptual artist, a Marcel Duchamp devotee with a sculpture degree, by way of documentaries produced by Steve Bannon. Once you know that, the signs stop looking like an attempt at censorship and start looking like what they might be: “readymades.” In 1917, Duchamp bought a urinal, signed it with a fake name, and submitted it to an art exhibition. Rejecting what he called “retinal art” — the art one sees — he wanted art that did its work in the mind. In his hands, that was through ordinary manufactured objects that he declared to be art: a snow shovel, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, the urinal. Duchamp’s argument, and what seems to be Taylor’s motivation, was that placement confers meaning, that an object becomes something else when authority positions it and names it. Or even in the attempt at positioning it: the exhibition rejected the urinal, almost nobody ever saw it, and the argument over it became the art itself, doing work in people’s minds as a symbol. 

Duchamp’s work came with a critique about the power of museums. But Taylor’s has an edge Duchamp never wanted: work that serves the power of the state. Put the Declaration of Independence in his 23-foot-tall Spirit of Liberty’s hand, with a raised sword in the other, and wait. 

That performance is what the sign is for. And like every readymade, it is addressed to people already inside the frame of reference. Nobody walking up Constitution Avenue gets persuaded by a sign any more than the art public of 1917 would have been persuaded by a urinal. The base sees the marking of territory and understands. Everyone else walks past it into the museum. And it’s the coverage doing the work. The performance consolidates. It does not convert.

There’s a third response running alongside the alarm and the mockery, and it deserves more care than the other two because it’s the most serious for how public history is operating today. Many people are rushing to call what the White House is doing fascism, or evidence of it. The process of erasing our history to enable the reshaping of reality that authoritarians require. I understand the reflex and respect the scholarship behind it. Jason Stanley has shown what authoritarians do with history: they dissolve a shared past and replace it with their own mythic one, harnessing nostalgia — the pain of a home to which one cannot return — to power. He’s right about that, so I rely on and boost his work, and I’ll keep doing it. But invoking it every time Trump touches a museum chases noise that authoritarians also need to keep people distracted, unmoored.



And it gets Stanley backward.

If you take his argument seriously — and you should — it tells you to watch where the mythic past is actually manufactured and distributed. And distribution is the whole game. A sign on a sidewalk outside a museum, even one on the National Mall, actually distributes very little because it distributes to an audience it can’t move. State curriculum laws distribute. The far right’s media machine distributes. The AI-generated slop flooding digital media feeds distributes at scale. A Supreme Court opinion in Trump v. Barbara that narrates Black citizenship as fulfillment of the founders’ intent distributes with force. That is where the mythic past is being built. Calling the sidewalk signs fascism while the actual work is done elsewhere is how you lose track of it.

Which brings us back to proportion. The history gatekeeping organizations are ring forts defending a valley that the American people no longer route their memory through, against an administration performing conquest of that same valley for an audience that is already behind its lines. Both sides need the museum to matter the way it mattered in 1994, because both sides built their theory of the fight in that world — and can’t seem to move on from it. Meanwhile, the actual people are somewhere else, working out their relationship to the past through screens, feeds, books, conversations, and their own lives.

I know because I just spent more than a month with them, where they are. They wanted to talk about their families and their country and how they could make sense of how we all got to where we are. They wanted to talk about tyranny, how Americans before them faced it, what worked, what didn’t work, what it all cost. They wanted to know how history informs what they can do, and how the people in power have used, and continue to use, history against them. And they wanted, above all else, to know what they might do with that knowledge, and who is standing in the way of them doing anything at all. 

Those conversations are the real terrain of public history in this country. The historians who want to matter in this fight need to be in them. Those who won’t need to get out of the way. At the very least, they should stop firing at an empty target.