I started going to the parks for nature. What I didn’t expect was how deeply I would fall in love with the history. And right now, some of that history is disappearing.
Since early 2025, the current administration has mandated the removal of exhibits, signage, and language related to race, slavery, indigenous history, LGBTQ+ history, and climate change from National Park sites and museums. Beth English — Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians — joins me to talk about how historians unravel truth, why our parks are where most Americans actually experience their history, and what’s at stake when that history is erased.
Removing a painting or a placard doesn’t mean the history didn’t happen. It just means we stopped telling it.
A note from Missy: Beth said something that I keep coming back to — that in survey after survey, the majority of Americans say they want the full, unvarnished presentation of the nation’s story. They don’t want it sanitized. Neither do I. This episode is also the unofficial launch of our Our Story series — the conversation that made me realize I needed to go deeper into the history our parks hold.
Episode Guest
Beth English – Executive Director
Organization of American Historians
Key Topics
- Why history connects us to who we are as individuals, communities, and a nation
- How historians unravel truth: primary sources, critical questions, context, verification
- Why history evolves — and why that’s deepening understanding, not rewriting history
- OAH’s cooperative agreement with NPS: connecting historians with parks for historical content studies
- Parks as the place where most Americans actually get their history
- History erasure: the current administration’s mandates to remove exhibits on race, slavery, indigenous history, LGBTQ+ history, and climate change
- Enola Gay exhibit controversy (1990s Smithsonian) — how historical debate was once resolved through stakeholder dialogue vs. today’s top-down erasure
- How to keep the story alive: tell it, fund it, staff it, and open it to new voices
Special Note
Since early 2025, the current administration has mandated the removal of exhibits, signage, and language related to race, slavery, indigenous history, LGBTQ+ history, and climate change from National Park sites and museums. Removing a painting or a placard doesn’t mean the history didn’t happen. Visit oah.org and npca.org to learn how to advocate for the protection of our public history.
Episode Transcript
History and the Parks — Why Telling the Full Story Matters Now More Than Ever
The Parks Podcast, Episode 59 | Beth English, Executive Director, Organization of American Historians
Why History Connects Us to Who We Are
Missy Rentz: I am excited to have Beth English on The Parks Podcast with me today. Beth is the Executive Director of the Organization of American Historians. Beth, welcome to The Parks Podcast.
Beth English: Thanks so much, Missy. Really glad to be here.
Missy: I am really excited because I think this is the start of a new series for me — and I haven’t really announced it yet. So this is the ta-da moment. I started going to the parks for nature and what nature does. I think it’s very healing. I love the discovery. I love the curiosity that nature encourages. What was unexpected to me is how I fell in love with the history and the stories that the parks tell us. Why is capturing history and remembering our history so important?
Beth: I think you put your finger on something really critical just in terms of how you reacted to the parks. History connects us to who we are — as individuals, as communities, as a nation. It helps us understand choices people have made in the past, struggles, values that have shaped the society in which people lived and experienced their world, but then also today. When we think about capturing history and preserving history, it’s not just about protecting something that happened in the past — artifacts and places. We’re really protecting and keeping a record of the voices, the lessons, the events that help us make sense of our present and give us context for our present. And without that, in a lot of ways we can really lose our sense of direction — whether it’s individuals, communities, or a nation.
Missy: So it’s a little bit of let’s learn from our mistakes, but also let’s learn from our successes?
Beth: Yeah, I think that’s right. There are parts of our past that are de facto bad because they’re not celebratory — they don’t tell a triumphal narrative about American history. In fact, that history should also be celebrated, if for no other reason than that it helps us understand where we’ve come from, it helps us understand the imperfect and ongoing American experiment, and it helps us have a better sense of the progress that has been made, and what still needs to be done.
Owning History — Seeing Ourselves in It
Missy: So I think like many people, when they read history or are told stories about history, they think “that’s them, not me.” I feel like there has to be ownership taken in all history. How do we get people to consume history as observers and learners, not as a personal attack?
Beth: I think it’s often good to look at history through your own individual lens, through your own experience. People who lived in the past were different from us because they lived in a different time and a different setting. But at the very core of history is that they were people. They faced choices. There were political pressures, moments of uncertainty, moments of celebration. They were just like us in some ways. When we see history as lived experience, that’s an opening for us to get past “that’s them, that’s not me.”
How Historians Unravel Truth
Missy: “History is not history unless it’s the truth.” What is the process that historians go through to unravel the truth, and how does time impact that story?
Beth: I think we should start by saying — small t truth. Historians start from the foundation of primary sources — the things that were created in the moment you’re studying, by the people you’re studying, that shaped the events you’re studying. We’re talking about examining multiple kinds of evidence: letters, documents, oral histories, photographs, even places — you can look at environments and landscapes and learn about the past. And then you take those together, weigh their reliability, weigh the context in which they were created, ask critical questions. Who created the source? What was the motivation? What does it tell us on its face? What does it not tell us? And then you use that to answer some central question about the past.
Beth: The goal for historians isn’t to get to one unchanging capital T Truth — because as new sources become available, as new methodologies become available, new interpretive lenses come to understand the past. Those often shape and influence understanding in ways that people writing historical analysis in years past might not have had access to. And so it opens new lines of analysis and broadens our understanding. In that sense, history is often talked about as a dialogue between the past and the present. But again, it’s grounded in evidence. It’s grounded in documentation. It’s grounded in verifiable truths revealed in those sources.
Missy: I think it’s so interesting — I’ve had several episodes with historical parks and I do think it’s really interesting how the Park Service has been really open to saying, this is new information we found, so this is the pivot in this story. If we found someone’s journal, or uncovered a structure, this is the new finding.
Beth: Yeah. And each new generation of historians will bring new questions and perspectives. Things that maybe were once overlooked or had been silenced might move to the center of our understanding. And that’s not rewriting history. That’s just understanding it from new perspectives. That’s what keeps history exciting. That evolution doesn’t mean it’s somehow tainting the fundamental basis and facts of our understanding of the past.
Missy: I love it when I’m at a park and there’s some discovery because someone found a journal in grandma’s attic, and being open and willing to hand those over to the National Park Service, who then handles them with kid gloves to see if they’re an important part of our history.
Beth: Yeah. And that’s what’s so cool about history — everybody has a history, right? You have family members who were around during really critical and pivotal moments in the country, but they have a personal story about that. When you can see yourself reflected in some of these big narratives that we often see in textbooks or in parks, that’s where you make that personal connection that’s really meaningful.
How OAH Works with the National Park Service
Missy: The Organization of American Historians does work with the National Park Service. What kind of work are you doing to help in the historic preservation of our parks?
Beth: The Organization of American Historians has had a long relationship with the National Park Service, starting decades ago with a cooperative agreement between OAH and NPS. The work that OAH does is connecting our member historians with the Park Service to do historical research. It can be things like historical content studies that look at an existing park — or a proposed park — and do the historical analysis to better understand the place, building, or person being remembered, and the contribution that was made to the bigger story of the United States. So we’re doing the history on which much of the interpretation that the parks present is based. The National Council on Public History has a very robust program as well. The idea is to get the very best and most cutting-edge scholarly research and apply those methodologies to what is going to be presented in public parks.
Beth: One of the things that’s really important about that is that places like national parks are where the majority of Americans — and thinking about all the international travelers that come to visit — get their history from. They may have had it in civics class or social studies when they were in school. But at the end of the day, a lot of people who have touchstones with history are often getting it from a sign at a National Park, or from going to visit the Smithsonian museums. These are really important places for public conveyance of the national story, the national past.
History Erasure in Our Parks
Missy: Our current administration has mandated that certain words and exhibits are removed from our National Parks and museums. Removing a painting or a placard doesn’t mean that the history didn’t happen. Why do you think this approach is being taken, and historically, has it been taken in the past?
Beth: What we’re seeing in the current moment is really an aggressive push to flatten American history into a single celebratory story and to control a uniform national narrative. What we’re seeing is really an attempt to censor, in the guise of a sort of imagined nationalism that says, to a certain group of Americans, “you are part of the national story,” and to other Americans, “you are not.” So that erasure is a way of signaling and making clear not just priorities, but who the administration feels is worthy of being part of that national narrative and that national story.
Missy: And in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it be this aggressive. But historically, has this censorship happened in the past?
Beth: I think you have your finger on the pulse of it — this is new in an important way. Historically, there have been attempts to remove or maybe soften the telling of parts of the past that reflect a debate. One of the points of contention often used as an example is the Enola Gay exhibit proposed in the nineties at the Smithsonian — there was a huge debate about how that was going to be interpreted, about the morality of atomic warfare. And what ultimately came on the other side of that particular moment is that the end result was a dialogue with different partners and different stakeholders of that story.
Beth: What we’re really seeing now is something very different — these changes mandated from a very central, very one-sided place, and the stakeholders and the experts are outside of that decision-making process. When we remove evidence or language or a particular individual or group from a story, it doesn’t mean that didn’t happen. It’s just that we’re not getting the full and honest picture of the past. And the big danger is that it potentially reduces public history — or at least the public history in some of these places — to propaganda: an artificial telling that has a political agenda on the other side of it.
Missy: Yeah. And I think sometimes I go to parks and I’m hearing a lot about native indigenous history and I’m devastated and I feel a lot of shame. I didn’t do that treatment 200 years ago. But there is a bit of ownership to it. And I think it’s important to learn about this. Removing it really prevents our education and our direction moving forward.
Beth: That’s right. And I think this whole effort to sanitize and to change signage — I just see it as a huge affront to the public’s right to think for itself. When you go to a park or a museum, how you see something and how you interact with it and how you feel on the other side of it — that’s personal to you. It’s a learning experience. What’s really striking is that in survey after survey, the majority of Americans say they want the full, unvarnished presentation of the nation’s story. They don’t want it to be sanitized. They want the evidence-based stuff. They want to understand where we as a collective society have come from, what they can learn from it, what they can do in the present to make a more just and empathetic society.
Missy: What can we do to keep the story alive?
Beth: Great question. Just keep telling it. Whether it’s at a National Park site, through a podcast, or just historians doing what they do and continuing to do the work — we keep it alive by just keep telling it, keep studying it in all its full complexity. And we need to think about what supports being able to do that: robust funding, adequate staffing at national park sites, making sure that all the related things that go into public history programs are well-resourced so that they can encourage people to engage, so that there is open discussion about the past. And also, opening spaces to new voices and interpretations that broaden that understanding. The more we engage, the more we dig, the more truthful the story being presented is — the more resilient that history becomes. You can change signage, but that doesn’t get rid of the history that exists.
Speed Round
Earliest park memory?
Probably the National Mall — being at the National Mall with my family. Everybody gets in the station wagon with the wood paneling and drives down from Pennsylvania, spends a week in Washington. I distinctly remember being at the Lincoln Memorial. My dad said to me, “Doesn’t this make you feel proud?” And I did — all goose bumpy. But being a kid and grouchy and surly, I said, no. But I just absolutely love the National Mall.
What made you love the parks?
I love the history — I’ve always been a history nerd. But I think also experiencing them with my family. My dad was losing his eyesight and had this bucket list of parks he wanted to go to. So we went to the Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Grand Canyon. This crazy park hop. It’s those kinds of things that make me love the parks — not just experiencing these amazing spaces and natural wonders, but having that closeness with people to be able to experience them with.
Favorite thing about the parks?
Probably that they are uniquely American in a lot of ways. They’re a testament to the scale and the diversity of our country. They’re also testaments to where we have come from — from the earliest days of when the parks were founded to our understanding of what those places were and now are, and how we can understand our history through them.
Favorite thing to do in a park?
I like to hike. I would say hiking. I also like a good park hotel where you can kick up your feet and just relax.
Park on your bucket list?
Glacier National Park. I’d love to see it — it’s so gorgeous and I’ve never been to a park like that before.
Three must-haves for a park visit?
Binoculars — always take binoculars. A jacket, because you never know when the weather’s going to turn. And practically speaking, snacks so I’m comfortable on the trip.
Favorite campfire activity?
Singing campfire songs. I love that.
Tent, camper, or cabin?
Cabin, if I had a choice for sure.
Hiking with or without trekking poles?
Without, definitely.
Favorite trail snack?
Probably almonds or some kind of salty snack like that.
Best animal sighting?
A grizzly bear in Yellowstone. I was out there with my family and my brother’s family, and we saw this amazing grizzly bear. The kids kept calling it “Grizz” through the whole trip — we had this thing with Grizz the whole time.
Favorite sound in the park?
Rushing water. Trickling water, streams and rivers. That’s just such a calming sound to me.
Greatest gift the parks give to us?
There’s something that we can all share together.
Missy: Beth, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for answering some of the questions I had about how history is captured and therefore told, and I really appreciate your insight and the importance of the history of our country.
Beth: It’s my pleasure. It was great to talk with you.
Missy: That’s it for today’s episode. Until next time — we’ll see you in the parks.
Music for The Parks Podcast is performed and produced by Porter Hardy. Follow us @TheParksPodcast or visit TheParksPodcast.com.