David Blight:
Well, that’s, frankly, nonsense. I mean, it all depends on what people consider to be a hero. It also depends on what people consider to be, as the Trump administration has explicitly said, patriotic history.
It is not the job of professional historians, whether they’re in universities, in the National Park Service, in the Smithsonian, or anywhere else, to fashion an openly patriotic history. Our job is to search everywhere and anywhere for the truth and then to convert it into narrative and convert it into stories that are compelling.
Americans love history, and they want a history they can trust. They want a history they think is honest. There are all kinds of heroes in American history. I happened to be the biographer of Frederick Douglass. A book came out recent — five years ago or so. Millions of people in this country consider Frederick Douglass a hero.
My job was to present him as a real human being. Sometimes, that was heroic, and, sometimes, it wasn’t. But that’s what historians do.
