Jerry Bransford spent over two decades as a ranger at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, watching visitors descend into one of Earth's largest cave systems. His family history ran deeper than most. His great-great-grandfather, Mat Bransford, was an enslaved guide who became an expert in those underground passages during the 19th century, leading notable visitors through caverns while being rented out for $100 a year.
The park once honored that legacy with a sign displaying five generations of Bransford cave guides. Now that marker hangs in limbo, caught in a broader campaign to reshape how American history appears across the national park system.
Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration launched an aggressive effort to review and rewrite historical content across the 433 parks, sites and monuments under the National Park Service. The result, according to critics and current and former NPS staff, amounts to a systematic erasure of stories involving slavery, Native American genocide, racial injustice, and climate change.
Last May, park employees received orders to flag any content deemed problematic within three months. The task overwhelmed already stretched staff, whose ranks had been cut by more than 25 percent since the administration took office. Without clear guidance, rangers and interpretive specialists were left to guess at what should be removed.
One employee described their approach by saying they put on a "white supremacist hat" to decide what to flag. Another asked themselves: "What would my bigoted neighbor not want to read about?" A park regional leader told staff to simply "guess what the offending language was."
The resulting database of nearly 2,000 flagged items, leaked in March by a group calling itself "civil servants on the front lines," reveals the scope of the review. A sign at the National Mall describing enslaved dock workers was flagged because staff questioned whether the word "enslaved" was acceptable. At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, climate change signs were marked for removal because they diminished focus on the "grandeur and beauty." At Little Bighorn Battlefield, park staff even used ChatGPT to determine if historical language about broken U.S. promises violated orders.
Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a Duke University history professor who previously worked on park materials, called the effort "both stupid and uninformed and very pernicious." She noted the administration had selected specific stories to preserve and others to erase based on who they wanted represented in a restored America.
Park officials initially promised that submissions would be reviewed by expert panels. That changed to a handful of senior NPS officials, a shift one employee described as a "bait and switch." Those deemed out of compliance were returned to parks for removal or rewriting, though details about which signs were affected remained tightly controlled.
A court-ordered inventory revealed at least 60 signs had been removed across 38 parks from Alaska to the Virgin Islands. The Interior Department acknowledged the list was incomplete, noting additional removals had not been accounted for.
The escalation marks a reversal of decades of progress. The National Park Service only began systematically addressing slavery's role in American history in the 1990s. Recent years brought new monuments to Japanese American internment at Manzanar, LGBTQ+ history at Stonewall, and the life of Emmett Till. Shane Doyle, Indigenous relations director for the Nature Conservancy and member of the Crow tribe, pointed out that Yellowstone still distributed brochures claiming visitors saw "the world as it was before humans," ignoring 12,000 years of Native American presence before forced relocations in 1872.
The censorship campaign prompted some staff to use the review process against itself. Park employees at Padre Island National Seashore flagged an exhibit falsely claiming the Karankawa had perished as a people. At Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, rangers noted a Civil War monument disparaged the Muscogee Creek Nation and damaged relationships with tribal partners.
Bill Hayden, who spent 31 years developing exhibits at Glacier National Park, said the process violated the fundamental mission of parks. "The national parks were all about researching science and researching history and telling the truth," he said. "I was never in a situation where I felt an administration was dictating what could or could not be shared with the public."
Gerry Seavo James, deputy campaign director of the Sierra Club's Outdoors for All campaign, framed the parks as "a massive national system of shared public classrooms" that had made progress diversifying the national narrative over the past decade. "In just one year, the Trump administration has turned back the clock on much of that progress," James said.
Despite the setback, Doyle expressed guarded optimism. "I don't think it's going to last long, and we'll get all that back," he said. "For Native people, this ain't our first rodeo. We've endured racism, we've been dehumanized since the very beginning, we'll ride out this storm."
Author James Rodriguez: "The parks were supposed to tell America's full story, not the version politicians wanted to hear, and erasing those inconvenient truths makes the whole system less honest."
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