Yes, You Can Change History (Erasure, Addition, and the Fight Over Whose History Gets Told)
A federal judge’s ruling caught my eye a few weeks ago — a court ordering the Trump administration to restore national park signs about slavery, Indigenous history, and climate change that had been stripped under an executive order targeting anything that “disparages” America. I started digging, just to understand the ruling. I ended up somewhere much bigger.
In this episode, Jay and I get into the real people and real places behind that court case — a soldier whose statue at Grand Teton leaves out a massacre, a Philadelphia house where George Washington invented the American presidency while keeping nine named people from a freedom that was legally available to them, a climate sign at Fort Sumter that vanished along with the history, and a redwood forest where a few sticky notes told a fuller story than the official signage ever had. Then we head north, to a quieter version of the same instinct: Ontario’s restoration of the John A. Macdonald statue at Queen’s Park, and the residential school memorial that didn’t come back with it. And we look at Parks Canada’s century-old, deeply imperfect system for actually adding context back into the historical record — plaque by plaque, sometimes ninety years too late.
We also talk about why the hit show Yellowstone, fictional as it is, sits on the same real land and the same real questions this episode is asking.
Because here’s the thing: yes, you can change history. People do it constantly, in both directions. The only question worth asking is which direction it’s moving in — are we adding back what got left out, or erasing what makes someone uncomfortable? One of those is honesty. The other is control.
In this episode:
* The June 2026 federal court ruling restoring National Park Service signage, brought by the National Parks Conservation Association and a coalition of historians and scientists, before U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley (D. Mass.) — verify exact case caption before publishing show notes
* Gustavus Cheyney Doane and the 1870 Marias Massacre — Grand Teton National Park
* The President’s House and the nine people enslaved by George Washington — Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia
* The climate change sign removed at Fort Sumter National Monument
* The “History Under Construction” signage at Muir Woods National Monument
* The John A. Macdonald statue and residential school memorial at Queen’s Park, Ontario
* The Rideau Canal and Duncan Campbell Scott plaque reviews — Parks Canada / Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada
* Where Yellowstone (the show) intersects with the real history of the American West
