Air Date: Week of July 25, 2025

Manzanar Internment Relocation Center, created by Executive Order No. 9066, issued February 19. 1942. It was the first of ten camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during WWII. (Photo: William Gill, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 4.0)

President Trump has ordered the Department of the Interior to review historic monuments and memorials, and remove any content that might be perceived as negative or unpatriotic. Independent historian Donna Graves joined host Aynsley O’Neill to discuss some National Parks that show America’s complex history and how these federal actions can lead to censorship.

Transcript

O’NEILL: On top of staffing and budget cuts, the National Park Service is also battling censorship. On March 27, President Trump signed an executive order with what some say is a deceptive title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” One part of the order instructs the Department of the Interior to conduct a review of historic monuments, memorials, and similar properties for content they perceive as negative or unpatriotic. The Parks asked both visitors and employees to report any such information. Also, the order aims to ensure that the content focuses on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” But over the last few decades, the Parks have made a priority of incorporating diverse narratives and exploring chapters of our history that hold conflict and discrimination. Independent historian Donna Graves worries that only showing some parts of America’s past in these parks is censorship. She joins me now. Donna, welcome to Living on Earth!

GRAVES: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be with you.

O'NEILL: So, tell us about this executive order regarding the Department of the Interior and our federal lands. How does this impact how history is portrayed across national parks?

GRAVES: The executive order requires the National Park Service to retell American history in a way that this administration feels supportive of, and one of the key phrases that they've used repeatedly is that history that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living needs to be reviewed and removed. The National Park Service has spent decades broadening the way it tells American story. It's been very thoughtful about this process. It's worked with professional historians and communities to find stories associated with national parks that are meaningful, that reflect the history of the site, and to stress how relevant these stories are to the American people. So, if you want to restrict American history to this kind of simplistic, very limited way of telling our nation's stories, you're taking what is a rich and complex past and reducing it to a kind of false narrative about who we are, and that really doesn't do the national parks or the American people any favors.

O'NEILL: And you're based in California, not too far from the Manzanar National Historic Site. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of that place?

GRAVES: Manzanar National Historic Site is one of a collection of places the National Park Service has deemed of great interest because it reflects a period in our history where the government did something shameful. It incarcerated all Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II on the premise that they might be threats to the war effort. Now, two-thirds of those people were United States citizens, and all of the over 120,000 people who were rounded up and sent from their homes and businesses and communities found themselves in remote, hastily constructed places that were called “relocation centers”. Really, they were incarcerated for the fact that they were of Japanese descent. This didn't happen to Germans and Italians, who also represented the Axis powers that we were fighting during World War II, and by the 1980s, the federal government admitted that what had happened was a grave mistake and that it was due to war hysteria and racism. So, it was natural then that the National Park Service would try to tell that story and Manzanar was the first of the so-called relocation centers that was designated a National Park. And it tells the story of mostly Japanese Americans from LA who were incarcerated there for several years and lost all of their belongings and then had to reclaim lives after the war in ways that were really difficult. It was a really hard time, and it's important that we have places that help us see mistakes we've made in the past, so that we can heal wounds and also prevent tragedies in the future.

O'NEILL: And Donna, as I understand it, you worked on the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Park. What did you want to champion in that park?

GRAVES: I helped found Rosie the Riveter, World War II, Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, over 25 years ago. It tells the story of the remarkable transformation of American society during World War II, within one city that held the most productive ship building facility in the world at that time, and that productivity relied on a new workforce of women and people of color, for the first time, who'd been previously kept out of those kinds of industrial jobs until so many men going off to fight on the battlefront caused a labor shortage. So, Rosie the Riveter World War II, Home Front Park interprets the incredible achievements of America during World War II, but we also look at the tensions and the—what might be called negative aspects of that history, such as the ongoing discrimination that women and people of color faced and the unjust incarceration of people of Japanese descent on the West Coast.

I became really interested in the connection between World War II and LGBTQ+ history, and realized that World War II was a watershed moment. One prominent historian describes it as America's coming out, and the Bay Area, where Richmond is located, was a place that tens of thousands of war workers came from other parts of the United States, and tens of thousands of military people came through and were briefly stationed in the Bay Area and then shipped off to the battlefront. What they saw in mostly San Francisco was a small but visible queer community that opened mental doors for so many people who lived in communities previously where they couldn't express their sexuality or their gender identification, and so those World War II years became a transforming period where many people who either passed through the Bay area or came here to work in defense factories, who were LGBTQ+ thought “Oh, I could live here, I could be myself here”.

And so, it really increased the trajectory of this area becoming what's described as the queer Mecca. I developed an exhibit about that, and the panels have been integrated into the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Center since 2016. After President Trump issued the executive order and after he made it so clear that his administration was going to target LGBTQ people, especially trans people, who are reflected in the exhibit at Rosie the Riveter, a staff person quietly took the exhibit down, thinking that it was going to protect the park, but a volunteer saw that and was really dismayed and people like that volunteer and myself started organizing to say, no, you can't take that down, it's part of our history. So, Rosie the Riveter put that exhibit back up, and I think that's a really important example of community and park leadership working together to make sure they're telling a story that is meaningful to residents of the Bay Area and to visitors.

O'NEILL: Donna Graves is an independent historian based in Berkeley, California. Donna, thank you so much for joining me today.

GRAVES: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

 

Links

Learn more about Donna Graves

Learn more about the Manzanar Historic Site

Learn more about Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park

World War II Monuments | “Rosie the Riveter Memorial - Beyond We Can Do It!”

National Park Service | “NPS Seeking LGBT WWII Stories”