Signs at national parks, like this one overlooking the Pea Ridge National Military Park, are being reviewed under a new national policy called ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to National History.’ Opponents are working to document the content of signs across the country. | Photo credit: Casey Mann
At national park sites across the country, educational signs detailing slavery, climate change, forced migration and other painful chapters of American history are slowly disappearing as they are replaced or removed under new federal directives.
President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” in March 2025. As a result of the order, national parks across the country have been instructed to remove any interpretive signage that portrays the U.S. in an unjust, negative light.
The order has prompted pushback from visitors and historians alike who claim the removal and rewriting of signs encourages exclusionary recollections of U.S. history.
The move by the Trump administration focuses primarily on changes made under former President Joe Biden. In accordance with the order, the Department of the Interior — responsible for overseeing the National Park Service — is tasked with determining whether, since Jan. 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues and similar properties within its jurisdiction have been altered to falsely reconstruct American history, minimize the value of historical events or figures or encourage improper partisan ideology.
The order also said that Americans have witnessed concerted efforts throughout the past decade to rewrite U.S. history, effectively undermining the nation’s achievements by casting its founding ideals in a negative light. It adds that the country’s legacy of advancing individual rights, liberty and happiness has been reframed as racist, sexist, oppressive or flawed.
Since the order’s signing, posters have been appearing at parks across the country urging visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
It does not appear that such posters have been placed in Arkansas, at least not yet.
Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, called the posters disturbing and said they undermine the National Park Service.
“For over a hundred years, National Park Service rangers have brought American history to life, and the American people deeply respect their work,” she said in a press release. “Rangers should be able to talk about the history of Japanese American incarceration at Amache, or the history of slavery at Fort Monroe, without looking over their shoulders in fear. If our country erases the darker chapters of our history, we will never learn from our mistakes. These signs must come down immediately.”
Some of the displays marked for removal include a photo of an enslaved Black man, heavily scarred with whip marks, at Georgia’s Fort Pulaski National Monument and several signs referencing climate change at Acadia National Park.
Another removed display at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City read:
“Some very new parks preserve not just lands or buildings but our nation’s ideas and ideals. They remind us of things we hope to live up to — like women’s rights and liberty — and things we hope never to repeat — like slavery, massacres of Indians or holding Japanese Americans in wartime camps.”
Arkansas parks have not remained untouched by the order.
According to a statement from the National Park Service sent in September via email, at the Fort Smith National Historic Site — which preserves almost 80 years of Native American history as Fort Smith served as an important gateway to the former “Indian Territory” that is now Oklahoma — a map was flagged to request changing the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” This move reflects another Trump administration executive order.
Representatives from the Fort Smith National Historic Site did not respond to requests to discuss the change despite numerous attempts requesting comment
In the same September message, NPS stated that it would be premature to comment on the situation as actions regarding national parks in Arkansas are ongoing.
In response to additional requests, NPS in November said that interviews with local park staff were not available, and they do not comment on personnel matters.
“The National Park Service remains focused on ensuring parks in Arkansas and across the country are safe and accessible to the public,” an NPS spokesperson wrote. “Park operations continue in accordance with enacted appropriations and departmental policy. The NPS appreciates the dedication and professionalism of its workforce, who remain committed to protecting park resources and serving millions of visitors every year.”
‘Collective Memory’ and Unchecked Revisions
Matthew Stanley, a historian of collective memory and associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, said the Trump administration’s order to change signage is a broad assault against professional history, expertise and critical thinking.
Stanley is not opposed to changing interpretations, since that process is at the root of the study of history. Still, he said the revision process should be rooted in rigorous research and review, not altered to better align with political narratives.
“What I’m seeing from the Trump administration and their directives has nothing to do with correcting inaccuracies,” Stanley said. “It really has to do with rejecting any historical narrative that the administration doesn’t like, particularly ones that complicate the idea of a triumphalist American story.”
He said a triumphalist rewriting of American history creates a “bedtime story” version that insults the intelligence of average Americans. It removes the context of racial and gender oppression, class conflict and anything else deemed unfavorable or inconvenient.
“People don’t come to the national parks or to a museum to encounter a simple, sanitized, glorious, triumphalist, uncomplicated, mythologized version of the past that a first grader might comprehend as the past,” Stanley said. “Most people come because they’re curious.”
Stanley has worked at both national and state parks throughout his career. He interned at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia and at Perryville Battlefield in Kentucky.
Stanley said collective memory — or the way groups of people remember the past — is often used to serve those in power.
“Nations want to present the best version of themselves rather than face uncomfortable truths about ourselves,” he said. “Of course, that’s what we call mythology, right? So much of collective memory is, actually, in effect, myth-making.”
He said the move by the administration goes back to the influence of Kevin Roberts, head of The Heritage Foundation, who has stated his goal of “institutionalizing Trumpism.” The Heritage Foundation, which wrote Project 2025, a conservative political playbook, has a guide to historic sites on its website that grades prominent sites around the country based on their perceived accuracy.
Stanley said the sign changes are a move toward institutionalized state propaganda.
“What do you call it when the past becomes subject to the approval of a political regime?” he said. “Or if there’s a quote, unquote “official narrative” that’s counter to what historians understand to be true and to what the evidence clearly reveals? When uncomfortable facts are called subversion, or woke, or something to be suppressed? There’s a word for that, and it’s state propaganda.”
When this censorship occurs, it results in a loss of diversity in perspectives that historians have been fighting to include for the last half-century, Stanley said. It lends itself to growing inequality and a reality in which only the wealthiest and most powerful can tell their stories.
“We don’t want a version of history that conforms to the interests and prerogatives of the super-rich, of the elite of the ruling class,” he said. “We want one that includes a variety of sources of perspectives, that includes all Americans and everyone who’s helped shape the story of this country, for better or worse. And that’s just not what the Trump administration is interested in.”
The ‘Save Our Signs’ Rebuttal
The president’s instruction to rewrite, reorganize and remove history has not gone unchallenged. The Save Our Signs project, or SOS, is a community-driven effort to preserve NPS interpretive materials before they are changed or removed. The project is a public archive of more than 10,000 crowdsourced photos taken across the country. A group of librarians, historians and data experts co-founded the project in partnership with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research and Culture.
A downloadable spreadsheet includes information about each photo, such as the name of the park where it was taken, the date it was taken and the title of the sign.
At least 155 photos have been taken at Arkansas NPS sites, according to SOS data.
The SOS website also features an interactive map of all NPS sites, noting which have photos submitted. As of the most recent map update, four of seven Arkansas NPS sites have submissions, including:
- Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site
- Fort Smith National Historic Site
- Hot Springs National Park
- Arkansas Post National Memorial
The Pea Ridge National Military Park, Buffalo National River and the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site have not had SOS photos submitted.
Signs at the Pea Ridge National Military Park describing the site’s history with Native American removal policies. | Photo credits: Casey Mann
Visitor and Staff Impacts
Jennifer Melroy has visited 59 of 63 national park sites. She is also the founder of National Park Obsessed, a travel blog she started to make national park travel as accessible as possible.
Melroy said any attempt to limit information and frame U.S. history as if it has no faults is unacceptable. She makes a point of providing park travelers with information about Native American history in relation to the parks, and her website includes a land acknowledgment.
Melroy added that even though the signs are being altered now, they haven’t always been accurate in the past either.
“I think we should be recognizing that history,” she said. “My biggest pet peeve is Aztec Ruins in New Mexico and Montezuma Castle in Arizona. Both of those sites have nothing to do with the Aztecs or Montezuma. We need to get with the tribes that are in the area and say, ‘What do you want this called?’”
Melroy said that when visitors cannot access firsthand knowledge and complete history, they learn a version of a story that is not necessarily wrong, but incomplete.
She said she has noticed some discussion and disappointment among parkgoers about changes to the park service, including recent funding and staffing cuts. Nevertheless, she said it is important to keep visiting NPS sites.
“If we’re not using them, we’re going to lose them,” Melroy said. “Part of it is getting people to care about them. And it’s a lot easier to care about stuff if you actually go see it once in a while.”
Amid changes to national park policies and sites, from January to October 2025, total yearly park recreation visits have decreased for the first time in more than five years, according to data from NPS Integrated Resource Management Applications. Monthly park recreation visits have also been lower each month in 2025 compared with the same month in 2024, except in January.
Melroy added that it is not just visitors who are harmed by these changes, but staff too. She has been friends with several park rangers for years, and she said that although she cannot speak for them, it is clear they are having a difficult time.
“They are all just kind of like, ‘I’m just going to keep my head down and just hope I have a job tomorrow,’” Melroy said.
She said the rangers she knows do not want to see funding, staffing and signage changes occur. She added that some of her friends have become more “cagey” with her recently when it comes to discussing the parks, out of fear that anything could be misinterpreted.
“They just shake their head, keep their head down, and [are] like ‘Four more years, four more years,’ or three more years, whatever…. A couple of them, I’m pretty sure, have somewhere a calendar where they’re counting down the days, just get through this, and then we’ll see what comes next.”
As actions regarding sign changes in Arkansas and beyond continue, it remains unclear how many interpretive materials will ultimately be affected. However, the directives have already reshaped the landscape of educational signs at national parks, altering what millions of visitors will encounter on their visits.