The Trump Administration recently partnered with Hillsdale College on the “Salute To America Taskforce 250,” convened to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary with a host of festivities and civic education initiatives. One of these, released last year, was “The Story of America” — a video series about the events leading up to the nation’s founding.
The series has 14 installments so far and covers episodes in early American history — from the American revolution to the philosophy behind the Constitution. It combines AI-generated thumbnails to reimagine the revolutionary period with narration over still images and appearances by President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in addition to Hillsdale and other college faculty.
Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts institution located in southern Michigan, is not known for accepting federal or state funding. Despite this, it provided much of the expertise, research and narration for the documentary.
Its offshoot, Hillsdale D.C., nationalizes a mission of returning the nation’s founding principles to its political life. Larry P. Arnn, Hillsdale’s president, stated that the series’ purpose is to restore pride in America’s legacy and pioneers.
However, as compromise erodes across the political spectrum, that vision is increasingly challenged.
The series, which debuted against the backdrop of the approaching semiquadricentennial also coincided with Executive Order 14253, a mandate to revise the way American history is portrayed at the Smithsonian.
The order, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” discontinued funding for exhibitions and programs that address a flawed national past and required that federal monuments, markers, and statues be aligned with an endorsement of American exceptionalism.
More recently, Whitehouse.gov published a distorted version of the Jan 6., 2021 Capitol Insurrection, framing the rioters as politically persecuted innocents and attacking then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It referred to the event as “a day which will live in infamy,” yet inverted its political meaning.
Trump’s authoritarian tactics, together with his broader agenda to whitewash history, have attracted criticism for “The Story of America.”
President Trump, on Jan. 22, released a video celebrating the series’ debut. In it, he refers to several stages in American history: the Big Stick Diplomacy era, the “taming of the Wild West,” as he characterizes it, and scientific discoveries.
“We enlightened the world with electricity and commerce, we defeated tyrants and vanquished dictators,”he said.
Sarah Weicksel, a director of The American Historical Association remarked that “The Story of America” feels flat. In her view, the complex challenges that marked America’s struggle to be a more perfect union are largely neglected, making the series’ message less resonant with a diverse audience.
The Revolutionary period is portrayed in the series as a struggle between American ideals and colonial rule. Yet, the complexities in the fabric of our nation and discrepancies between an aspirational document and its application are largely eschewed.
In the episode, “The Faith of Our Fathers,” Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University in Virginia, expressed that “a lot of nonsense has been written about the faith of America’s founders.” As explained in the episode, they were not simply inspired by the Enlightenment values of rational thought and tolerance but drew on Biblical teachings of human dignity and equality in the eyes of God.
In reference to the famous line, “all men are created equal,” he explained that many of the founders could not reconcile American slavery with the equality principle and therefore began to oppose it. In his interpretation, this was a reason for the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in the territory that was to become the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.
Although the episode touches upon how the issue of slavery affected the conscience, it ultimately does not go deep enough to confront the reality of slave-ownership among the founding fathers. As a result, the episode loses its discussability and potential to probe audience understandings.
Abraham Lincoln recognized the shortfalls of realizing the Declaration’s vision in early America, where most of the nation was involved in the evil of human bondage. However, he interpreted its aspirational wording as an initial step — “a stumbling block to slavery,” and the seed of its eventual abolishment.
Per Lincoln’s view, the principle that “all men are created equal” encapsulated a broader future vision. He maintained that the struggle for absolute equality is universal and ongoing, emphasizing the precedent-setting nature of the Declaration’s word for later times.
“It has always been difficult to tell America’s story,” Martin Hershock, a history professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn, said.
His words couldn’t be truer at a time when a warped interpretation is being pushed. Amid this, classroom debates about how to best profess our history abound — fraught between a utopian revisionism and an interrogative approach to understanding who we are as a nation and from whence, we’ve come.
Lincoln’s appraisal of the Declaration’s ambiguities and potentials, nonetheless, strike a medium. His words illustrate that to envision a path forward; any nation must reconcile with its past.
An element of criticism in our outlook is just as necessary as memorializing the strengths of our nation. True patriotism, then, should ask us to reckon with our nation’s wrongdoings—not shun them from collective memory.
