https://19thnews.org/2026/08/national-park-signs-women-lgbtq-history/
"Jenny McBurney, a librarian specializing in government publications, was in
Washington, D.C., in June when she heard the news that the Department of
Interior, the agency responsible for overseeing the national park system, had
produced a spreadsheet listing dozens of sites where it had removed materials
deemed disparaging to Americans or unrelated to the beauty and grandeur of our
national parks.
She and other people who happened to be in town for a convening about the
importance of public history in telling the complete American story, decided to
visit some of the places on the spreadsheet to see exactly what had been
modified in the nation’s capital.
“We were calling it our little sign quest,” quipped McBurney. “We were going to
go, and you know, hunt down as many as we can.”
One of the stops was the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument,
designated by the Obama administration in 2016 to honor the National Woman’s
Party, which fought for women’s equality and was founded by suffragettes Alice
Paul and Lucy Burns.
McBurney helped inspect the informational plaques outside the brick building
until they found what they had been looking for: a recent alteration on a sign
describing some of the tactics used by suffragists to fight for the right to
vote.
A 2025 photo of the plaque shows the sign stating that after women were
imprisoned for a protest outside of the White House in 1917, they were “beaten
and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.”
The sign now reads: “The women, many of whom came from prominent and
politically connected families, demanded to be treated as political prisoners.”
The new placard also leaves out a reference that this was a turning point that
helped change public opinion on women’s suffrage. In other words, they are
“removing the fact that that action worked,” McBurney said.
The 19th has contacted both the National Park Service and the Department of
Interior to comment about this and other removals at national park sites and
did not receive a response.
The changes were alarming to Burney, who, the year before, had co-founded an
organization with public historians and other women librarians called Save Our
Signs. Its goal is to create a crowdsourced historical record of information
signs at national park sites, in the event they are changed under the Trump
administration.
“If people go to these sites and expect to see the full history, and they’re
not seeing that, then that is a missed opportunity for so many people,” said
McBurney. “Especially with the quiet changes on the signs where you can’t even
tell that something’s been changed. They think that they’re hearing the whole
story, but they’re not, and that’s not fair to them.”"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
