Citizen historians are documenting history as displayed e.g. in signs at national museums and monuments, as those are censored, so that the censorship will be known, and the past will be remembered.
The Washington Post has the story:
A professor challenged the Smithsonian. Security shut the gallery. As President Donald Trump seeks to reshape its museums and other cultural institutions, wall text has become a battleground and documentation a form of resistance. By Kelsey Ables
"On a Monday afternoon this winter, 64-year-old historian James Millward climbed the steps of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery with a “little stack of handouts, like a good professor,” and no sense of the drama that was about to unfold.
He had heard that when the museum swapped out the president’s portrait in January, it also removed a placard mentioning Donald Trump’s impeachments and the Jan. 6 insurrection. For Millward, a scholar of Chinese history, well-versed in the censorial methods of that country’s Communist Party, the development stirred a familiar feeling: unease at seeing “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared.”
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"Stationed next to the freshly mounted portrait, which shows the president scowling over his desk, Millward offered printouts of the old wall text to interested visitors. They stated plainly that Trump was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”
Millward called it “guerrilla teaching.” He was at the Portrait Gallery as an educator but also as co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, a group that last year spent thousands of hours documenting every corner of the Smithsonian, to track any changes made as Trump administration officials assert control over the content of the museums. “I think it’s really important,” he says, “to show that the people are noticing.”
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"Within minutes, Millward estimates, a group of eight to 10 guards had gathered in the gallery. They were wearing different uniforms, he says, some with handcuffs and guns. Soon, they cleared the room of visitors and closed off the exhibition.
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" Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University who has studied censorship, says the work of groups such as Citizen Historians could prove critical.
“Censorship is not just one moment,” he says. “It’s not just some external authority coming and saying, ‘This is going to be removed.’”
Documentation is a way to fight back. Because, he says, “the worst kind of censorship is the censorship we never know has happened.”
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