U.S. News

Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was “appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised”, when he read the executive order. “There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,” he said. “I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.”

The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.

“I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It’s a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we’ve been writing for a century.”