04 Culture

University essay series argues Trump administration is creating ‘regime of forgetting’

A history scholar at the University of Michigan criticized the federal government’s efforts to portray the United States in a positive light for the nation’s 250th anniversary, claiming during a webinar Tuesday that doing so “aims to conceal difficult but necessary truths.”

The “History in a Time of Forgetting” webinar, which The College Fix attended, kicked off an essay series of the same name focused on areas of history that the authors claim are a target of the Trump administration.

Jennifer Brady, director of the university’s Inclusive History Project, opened the webinar by criticizing the administration’s efforts to focus on the positive and unique qualities of the United States for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

The central thesis of the “History in a Time of Forgetting” series is that the Trump administration is creating barriers in order to push a “particular version of U.S. history,” she said.

Brady called this a “regime of forgetting,” a term that she said refers to powerful institutions making history more difficult for the public to remember. Examples of this include failing to create or maintain archives, neglecting to consider certain perspectives, cutting projects’ funding, or even threatening “retaliation for sharing knowledge that complicates a preferred narrative,” Brady said.

She accused the federal government of taking “concerted steps to shape and disseminate a version of the nation’s history that erases essential parts of our shared national past, and that aims to conceal difficult but necessary truths.”

The essay series is “a call to those who seek to resist the rise of a singular and exclusionary history,” she said.