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On Juneteenth, I feel the need to speak out (again) about the selective history being pushed by the current administration.
My objections are twofold.
First--and every administration we've ever had has been guilty of this to a lesser or great degree--the White House has no business decreeing or enforcing one particular historical narrative over another. The executive branch has no training in historiography. The bureaucrats who run it don't know what they're talking about.
Second, the particular story now being shaped by executive decree tells us that we can only be a great nation if we ignore the evils done in the past.
As a historian, I find that to be dishonest and manipulative. As a Christian, I find that it goes against a central gospel message: that confession and repentance open up the path to new life.
I'm going to borrow from Nathalie Baptiste's insightful opinion piece posted yesterday--please read the excerpts and visit the original (linked below).
And also consider downloading the Well-Trained Mind Press's free Juneteenth resource packet. It's our support for real history study.
welltrainedmind.com/p/juneteenth-booklist-activities/
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Conservatives have long failed to really reckon with America’s racial history, and politicians have often tried to downplay its significance and cover up some of the more appalling parts of the past. But the Trump administration has largely dispensed with the whitewashing and instead has taken to trying to completely rewrite history.
“It’s more than just trying to erase Black history,” said Bryan Stevenson, the co-founder and executive director at the Equal Justice Initiative. “It’s trying to alter American history.”
“The story of slavery is a critically important story to the history of this country. We had a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It shaped the constitutional amendments that have been so impactful in the 20th Century,” he said. “And to not be honest about that history just creates a misunderstanding of who we are as a nation.”
...Two months after returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” which ordered federal institutions to deemphasize slavery and racism when talking about American history.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the order says. “Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”
...The federal government has also attempted to remove Black history from public view by taking down exhibits in our national parks, and by using rhetoric that routinely downplays and scoffs at the reality of the nation’s historic horrors.
George Washington, one of the founding fathers, enslaved nine Black people at the President’s House in Philadelphia, where he lived and governed before Washington, D.C., was built. There has long been an exhibit at Independence Hall memorializing the people Washington enslaved, a depiction of the contradiction between espousing liberty for all while holding people in bondage.
But in January, National Parks Service workers removed the exhibit, with a spokesperson saying the agency was abiding by the March 2025 executive order. The city sued the federal government, and a judge ordered the display to be restored. A federal judge then blocked the administration from removing it again while lawsuits make their way through the courts...
There was a similar incident in West Virginia when National Park employees were reportedly instructed to remove information about slavery abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park.
At another unnamed park, a photo of the scarred back of a man who escaped slavery in Louisiana was also set to be taken down, according to the Washington Post. The removals were related to Trump’s executive order. (A federal judge ordered the Trump administration last week to reinstall any historical or scientific displays it had removed.)
“If they’re able to seize hold of and create a dominant narrative of U.S. history that excludes many of the people who lived that history, then our students, our museum visitors, our national park visitors, and all Americans will not have access to the entirety of their history,” Weicksel said...
When Nazi Germany fell, a new government took over, and today all Germans get comprehensive education about the horrors of the Holocaust. When apartheid, government-sanctioned racial segregation, ended in South Africa, the new regime made sure to create a museum that detailed their country’s racist history.
The U.S. still has never had such a reckoning.
“I think people in this country have been reluctant to talk about this because the people who benefited from slavery continued to be in power after the Civil War,” Stevenson said. “The people who benefited from terror violence and Jim Crow laws never had to give up power.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-admin-rewrite-black-history_n_6a32d2ade4b057a50ce923a4
Juneteenth Resource Packets - Well-Trained Mind
welltrainedmind.com
Age-appropriate book lists, lessons, discussion questions, and activities to help you and your family learn more about Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. PDF Download.3 hours ago
This makes me think about Turkey, where a majority of the population doesn’t believe the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide ever happened, because it has been erased from their history by their government. Woe to us if we allow the horrors of slavery to be forgotten!
You mischaracterize Washington's views on slavery. Why should we think you are the one neutral and objective historian? Everyone should read Washington's own will and understand the context. He inherited slaves and could not at the time legally free them, nor his wife's slaves from her first marriage. One scholar has quoted great quantities of Washington's actual correspondence and other writing on this and other topics, rooted in 20+ years of research at the LOC. Dr. Catherine Millard. All, go to Millard's primary sources and don't rely on these half baked interpretations. Also see the facts and historical context at mountvernon.org www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/george-washingtons-will
I think to say that the “US has never had such a reckoning” is honestly unfair.. As one example, I’ve been to the beautiful Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C and it is very well done.
Absolutely. You are correct. Confession and repentance are means of grace. Pride and denial fool only ourselves.
(1) Have you spoken elsewhere to a tendency for homeschool curricula to do the same sort of whitewashing? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that or reading a fuller treatment elsewhere. It would be great to have a sort of annotated bibliography of textbooks and curricula that do this well (or maybe a list of the egregious ones). Thanks for the Juneteenth resource you have provided! (2) I think of this administration as capitalizing on a sort of grievance over people feeling constantly shamed or perhaps overstatements of racism (or sometimes talking past each other on what even someone means by accusations of "racism"). So I think of this as a pendulum swing. If you agree with that characterization at all, how do we avoid a pendulum that overstates or paints with too broad a brush? I'm not looking to excuse anything, nor am I implying that white Americans are close to perfectly appreciating past wrongs. I am simply interested in how to press toward greater education, maintaining accuracy and avoiding the pendulum swing.
Thanks so much for making this free! I’ve been looking for a resource to share with my kids.
Thank you for speaking to this.
He can try to hide it all he wants. We still know the truth.
Thank you for offering the educational materials about Juneteenth for free!❤️
Thank you for sharing this!
Thank you for offering this resource for free! It is greatly appreciated!
Thank you, Dr. Bauer. I continue to be grateful for your great gifts as a historian and writer.
Thank you for posting this
Do you know what's happening in South Africa now?
This is one of the many reasons we homeschool. We talk about why the Civil War happened and the reasons Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. I also understand that leftists are more guilty of trying to revise history than conservatives.
Ask your average teen to tell you one FACT about president Thomas Jefferson, OTHER than he had sex with a slave named Sally. Their responses will be instructive about how history is taught today.
Well, I had a few more thoughts after yesterday’s post, and they’re a bit on the discursive side, so pour yourself a glass of iced tea or your choice of adult beverage and bear with me.
One of the biggest challenges facing higher education right now is the extent to which every discipline in the humanities uses writing both as a way to train students in thinking, and to make sure that they’re actually taking time to absorb the content. In my university teaching days, I assigned reaction papers, summary papers, short arguments, essays on literary techniques, and so on, and so forth. Those always ended up having a dual purpose. They forced my students to crack open the texts they were supposed to be reading, but they also exposed all of the thinking problems: fuzzy connections, lack of understanding, the inability to know when you’ve proved your point, the lack of skill in using resources properly.
At least at the moment, we can’t continue to assign those kinds of papers. Yes, they can be done in class, with laptops closed and smartphones powered down, but they will be shorter (that’s not a bad thing), less complex (that’s not a good thing) and, more problematically, will take up the class time that used to be available for discussion, questions and answers, in-person face-to-face explanations.
You know, teaching.
I actually think writing will survive. There’s a building body of evidence suggesting that AI-generated texts are already falling into a “training loop” —meaning that AI learns by harvesting prose online it, and the more online prose is actually produced by AI, the more AI is just reproducing itself and becoming more and more distinctively AI. Check out
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-ai-generated-prose-diverges-human-writing-and-why-it-...,
and also wapo.st/4e2mXyR,
for more on this phenomenon.
There’s also the imagination problem. Ultimately, AI works on ideas that are already present in the world, combining and recombining them. Yes, so do all writers. I was startled, recently, to reread a novel I first inhaled when I was a teenager and had thoroughly forgotten—and to find there an entire plot strand that I’d reproduced in my current fiction project. My subconscious had been quite busy.
But there is still an indefinitable element to human imagination that hasn’t yet appeared in AI-generated topics and plots. Human-generated plots and scenarios are unexpected. AI plots and scenarios are still least-common-denominator driven. For more on this, check out
www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pVA.rwJt.OS...
and
arxiv.org/abs/2604.03136
I particularly like this conclusion, for what it’s worth:
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A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist' choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.
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That plot strand that I reproduced from the novel I read when I was thirteen? It was altered and reshaped, not by an amalgam of other stories, but by my own experience of growing up on a subsistence farm, of a disastrous first romantic relationship (yeah, yeah, we all had one if we’re flesh and blood), of the realization that my muscles were inadequate for a physical task.
So far, that’s what will still hold “human-written original works” apart from AI-generated prose.
So, I remain cautiously optimistic about the future of “human-written” words.
I’m less optimistic about teaching.
In our current university system, we spend 3 50-minute periods or 2 90-minute periods teaching each week. If we have to use most of that to watch our students write, so that we’re sure they’re not using AI to teach…we have become glorified hall monitors, not mentors or disciplers. What time do we have for actual teaching?
My cautious optimism on this front is that we may yet adapt (humans are good at that) and find a way around the problem. My pessimism is that this won’t happen soon. Change is at LEAST a decade away, and that’s being crazy optimistic.
All four of my children got through university before the current AI explosion. If I had a teenager now, I’m not sure I’d put them into a freshman class at college. Vocational training, a day job, and evenings with an intelligent book club might be a better option.
StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
arxiv.org
As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can...1 week ago
I really appreciate all the info you’ve shared above. I despair the potential loss of lecture/ discussion time. I’d hope maybe colleges will go to a supervised “work time” for tests and essays if necessary, with a TA, and let the classroom time still exist, as my young adults have had such valuable professor relationships that wouldn’t occur without this space. These have been invaluable for their personal and professional growth and opportunities. For this same reason, I also caution against your statement about not attending college (while of course trades and such are immensely valuable so not knocking that at all!!) But because many who might be your followers might have heard the message that “college will destroy your values”, or the the “distrust of certain institutions” mood of many in the country- so your comment may add to that message- and deprive students of the incredible growth and opportunity that comes from college studies. Just some alternate thoughts 🙂 Of course college is only one of many wonderful paths and many thrive better in a different path, i just don’t want to see the college / liberal arts path disparaged, but rather taken seriously by students and faculty willing to do the hard work if it’s the best path for them.
Recording studios sample pianos key-by-key to produce excellent and largely convincing digital piano libraries, but they still struggle to capture sympathetic resonance: the effect all the strings have on each other in a particular performance. I expect AI will remain unable to predict the human imagination in an analogous way to a much greater degree.
I have an 11 year old, so I have a few more years to see how this shakes out. I think your thoughts are sound, and we will definitely consider vocational training, but I'm a little troubled that there seems to be a hard push for no college/ go to vocational school/ get a trade that I feel uneasy about. I know the world is changing, and I think weighing all kinds of opportunities is good, but I keep on wondering who benefits from this narrative, and are they trying to hoard education and opportunities for themselves/ their family/ the in crowd? There are careers that will still (at least for the foreseeable future) require college degrees. Anyways, just my two cents. I'm really glad we aren't at a decision point now.
I so agree with your last thought about sending kids to college right now. I feel guilty for not encouraging my oldest to look at trades, he was a straight A student.....of course college seemed like the next step. What are your thoughts about the reversed classroom model for classes with a lot of writing? Taped lecture at home is the homework, writing is in class with the teacher available for discussion. Lots of pros and cons - but I'd love to read your take.
I really appreciate your insights. My oldest is through college, thankfully. However my 3rd daughter just graduated from high school and my son is 12. AI is everywhere. My daughter did not want to join the college application chaos. She has been working for the last two years and decided to move an hour away from home to attend a great community college, found a new job, a roommate and an apartment. She is going to give it a year and see if she likes her new path.
I have 2 kids in college and a third in high school- all homeschooled with a combo of programs. Neither of my college kids have tried to use AI for their work, and they don’t write things that could be written by AI. You and Julie Bogart convinced me to let my kids write weird stuff- that college professors were bored with reading the same essays over and over. So my kids write analogies in their papers that no one had ever thought of. They actually have LD issues, so they get to type even if the class writes by hand. But none of them wrote full essays until 11th or 12th grade- so they weren’t burnt out on writing when they started college. They weren’t looking to just get the minimum because they didn’t know how to do that. They entered college ready to learn, not worn out. I think it matters a whole lot what kids do before college. My public high school taught me to make cookie cutter essays AI could write. My kids don’t know how to write an essay that looks like every one else’s.
I've been playing with writing random stuff...short fiction, long fiction, just fluff stuff on various AI to see what it does. It uses the same names over and over. It even points out that it's using the same name...and it'll have like five characters named something like Marcus and even point out the absurdity of these characters all coincidentally having the same name, and say they aren't related. The cadence of dialogue is...strange, like it gets into patterns that are so similar. It has no nuance and characters with any neurodivergent traits all sound like computers reciting stats. It repeats lines over and over. I don't know how many times it spits out, "We're going to figure this out. Together." It's an inside joke at this point. It lacks genuine wit and sarcasm. It has characters do things that are anatomically impossible like lean over to grab something as the same instant of also shifting gears while driving with their "other hand". It forgets about things that happened and were major plot points in the previous chapter. It does things in an order that makes no sense. I am getting my kiddo interested in writing with it, though. We're getting some typing skills in, we're working on a pokemon fanfiction this summer, and we're going for walks and talking over the story and the character development and the story arc and how we're going to break up chapters. Once we get something generated we're going to edit it together. So we're workshopping AI generated Pokemon/Mario fanfics with a reluctant writer, which is a fun summer project.
I have three kids, and I am a High School visual arts teacher. University degrees are still very valuable. My youngest will be a Senior in High School and is interested in Computer Science Engineering. As we have explored college programs, I have been impressed by the amount of deep theory, skills and information he will be introduced to laying a foundation for a future career. Within all of the engineering programs are mandatory paid internships. Genius! My middle son is in a large state university, (Louisville) because that is what we could afford. All of the private liberal arts school were way out of our price range. He is a Busness and Marketing Major who wants to create community through business. Some of his base classes have been a bit boring, but is an Honors students. These classes are small discussion based classes and are phenomenal! He is basically getting a liberal arts degree. I find the program intriguing. My daughter just graduated from a small liberal Arts University, Asbury. with a Visual Arts and Communication Degree she wants to be involved in film and/ or Theatre production design- sets & costume. He program was more technical, but also had many discussion based theory classes. Almost all Essays were written in class. Professors are using more time in class for discussion and writing. Maybe Writing labs are where students need to have to write essays now, so technology can be monitorsed? I do see many aspects of a traditional technical school being used in Universities now. And do see the need for Universities to adapt, but they are still needed to prepare our future thinkers and doers.
I think this opens room for the non writers as well. My kid may not go to college because of a written expression disability. Orally though? Whew the things that come out of that kid. It’s not always been the case that actual writing proved learning. And realistically, very few careers require it often. What if we establish learning centers where debate, oral exams, portfolio projects, actual work products and more were the “proof”? We might build skills actually needed in the world- how to absorb information, hear varied opinions, and form new, actionable thoughts. There is always room for writers, folks who can notate all the big ideas floating in the room and make them into something shareable. But perhaps the death of the chapter summary will make room for the thinkers who can’t keep up with the output demands. Maybe exams come back a bit. Or whole new categories return… like scribes and others. I hope in the end we evolve back into a model that has a path for more learners.
Bookmarked. I appreciate you, Susan.
Excellent Reuters article. Thanks for sharing.
