Jerry Bransford, a former US National Park Service (NPS) ranger, has always had a deep connection with the land he grew up on – and the land hundreds of feet below it. His great-great-grandfather, Materson “Mat” Bransford, was one of the earliest explorers of Mammoth Cave in south-central Kentucky, the largest known cave system on the planet.
But for decades, Mat wasn’t paid for his work. Enslavers rented him out for $100 a year to a man who wanted to turn the site into a tourist attraction – what would later become Mammoth Cave national park.
In the mid-19th century, Mat was one of several enslaved guides who became an expert in the hundreds of miles of underground terrain, leading notable guests like Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil and Ralph Waldo Emerson through a sprawling labyrinth of dark passageways and caverns.
“At the hotel, restaurant and slave quarters, they were in slavery, but once they went down inside that cave, they were free,” said Jerry, 79, who worked at Mammoth Cave national park for more than two decades.
Mammoth commemorated this history with a sign showing five generations of Bransford cave guides. But now, it could be in jeopardy.
Often heralded as “America’s best idea”, national parks are the closest thing the country has to sacred lands. What many may not realize, however, is that US history – not just nature – is at the heart of the visitor experience at most of the 433 parks, historic sites and monuments in the NPS system.
But over the past year-and-a-half, this history has been under attack, as the Trump administration has raced to reconstruct a version of US history they prefer – one in which the Bransfords didn’t exist, the genocide of Native Americans didn’t happen, George Washington didn’t own slaves and the glaciers aren’t melting because of the ongoing climate crisis.
The Guardian spent months reviewing thousands of images, files and documentation while talking to current and former NPS employees to understand how the Trump administration has attempted to rewrite hundreds of years of US history.
This is the story of how they nearly did it – removing scores of signs across the country – and the scars this censorship campaign has left on the country’s beloved NPS.
Critics say what’s happening in the national parks is more insidious than pandering to Donald Trump’s base or winning “culture wars” – it’s about the erasure of anyone who is not white, wealthy, Christian or male, and it’ll likely have a chilling effect on how history is told at the national parks for years to come.
“It’s both stupid and uninformed and very pernicious,” said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a history professor at Duke University who helped write visitor handbooks and conduct history research for several national parks in the US south-east prior to the Trump administration. “The Trump administration has a very particular idea of whose stories are important and whose stories made the America that they hope to restore.”
The Department of the Interior did not answer questions about how flagged materials were reviewed and how many signs had been removed or altered across the national park system.
‘What would my bigoted neighbor not want to read about?’
Last May, the Trump administration gave park employees three months to review all content in the parks, a monumental task that quickly overwhelmed staff whose ranks had been cut by more than 25% since the start of the administration.
One park regional leader told staff in a meeting to just “guess what the offending language was”. Another manager said: “If there’s any doubt at all … whether you think it’s appropriate or not, put it on there, report it.” All park employees the Guardian spoke to requested anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk to the media and feared professional reprisal.
With little to no guidance, many park staff were left to fill in the blanks themselves. One employee said the way they flagged materials was to “put on [their] white supremacist hat”; another asked themselves: “What would my bigoted neighbor not want to read about?”
In March of this year, the database of staff submissions was leaked by an anonymous group that calls themselves the “civil servants on the front lines”.
The Guardian verified the contents of the database with multiple NPS staff.
The leaked database – which includes nearly 2,000 images and files of flagged park material – provides a rare and detailed look into how Trump’s executive order was implemented and the broad swathe of park history and science that was at risk of censorship.
Several entries show staff were unsure about what to do or guessing at what they should submit. A sign at the National Mall in Washington DC, describing a now defunct waterfront wharf, was flagged for a brief reference to enslaved dock-workers. “You might hear the shouts of hundreds of dockworkers, many of them enslaved people until the end of the Civil War in 1865,” the sign read. The submitter wrote: “is the word ‘enslaved’ ok here?”
At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a part of the country where homes are being swept away into the ocean, signs about sea level rise and climate change were flagged because they “reduce the focus on the grandeur, beauty and abundance”.
And at Little Bighorn battlefield national monument, park staff used ChatGPT to determine if some signs that said the US “implemented harsher policies and broke more promises” and was “hungry for land and gold” were in violation of Trump’s executive order.
Park employees said NPS leadership initially told them that submissions would be thoroughly reviewed by a panel of subject matter experts. Later, officials said they would be reviewed by just a “handful of senior NPS officials”, said one park employee, a change another park employee described as a “bait and switch”.
“It’s infuriating,” said one ranger. “I joined the park service because their mission is to educate and to inspire, and you can’t do that with history that’s been sanitized.”
Submissions that senior NPS officials deemed “out of compliance” with Trump’s executive order were sent back to the parks to be rewritten or removed.
But park employees say senior officials kept details about which signs to remove “very tight to their vests” and that most park employees didn’t know which signs had been removed unless they were ordered to take them down. Any feedback about changes was unclear and came in irregular fits and bursts.
“There was a meeting and a call that I was on, and [our regional director] said: ‘You need to fix it,’ but you could tell everybody on the call was like: ‘Fix it how?’ And they’re like: ‘You come up with that,’” another anonymous park employee said.
60 signs across 38 parks
An official list of removed signs was revealed only after a judge ordered the interior department to provide an inventory as part of an ongoing lawsuit. It showed at least 60 signs across 38 parks, from Alaska to the Virgin Islands.
Advocates say the list is incomplete, but it’s the most comprehensive view of the extent of the Trump administration’s censorship campaign to date. The interior department noted in a subsequent court filing that there are more removed signs they didn’t account for.
“It’s pretty tragic what’s transpired,” said Bill Hayden, a former interpretive specialist who worked on exhibits and signage at Glacier national park for 31 years.
Developing park signage was typically a deliberative, months-long process that involved consultations with scientists, archaeologists and historians, Hayden said. “The national parks were all about researching science and researching history and telling the truth. I was never in a situation where I felt an administration was dictating what could or could not be shared with the public.”
Turning the clock back on progress
Based on the Guardian’s review of flagged and removed material, stories about slavery, racism and discrimination against Black Americans and Native Americans, and the climate crisis were the ones most at risk of censorship. These are also stories the NPS has historically omitted or struggled to tell.
When the country’s first national park, Yellowstone, was created in 1872, the Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Blackfeet and other Native peoples who had called the area home for centuries were forcibly relocated to reservations and banned from entering the park.
But for most of the park’s history, visitors were told that Yellowstone was a pristine wilderness untouched by human habitation, said Shane Doyle, Indigenous relations director for the Nature Conservancy and a member of the Crow tribe. Even now, Doyle says there are still brochures at Yellowstone that read: “When you watch animals in Yellowstone, you glimpse the world as it was before humans.”
“It’s like, what?” Doyle said. “This is not a virgin paradise, like the Garden of Eden, people have been here for 12,000 years.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the park service began to include more complete histories in existing parks – including mentions of slavery as a cause of the civil war – and establish new parks memorializing the history of Black, Asian American and LGBTQ+ history.
The Manzanar national historic site in California, which memorializes the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during the second world war, for example, was established in 1992. The Stonewall national monument in New York, the first national park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history, was created in 2016. And in 2023, three sites that are part of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley national monument were established in Mississippi and Illinois, to recognize the life and legacy of the 14-year-old Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
“Our parks and public lands are like a massive, national system of shared public classrooms,” said Gerry Seavo James, deputy campaign director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign. “And over the past decade or so, I think we’ve done a much better job with diversifying our national narrative.”
In just one year, the Trump administration has turned back the clock on much of that progress, said James. “The goal now is just to sell a whitewashed and sanitized view of that history.”
Still, Doyle remains hopeful. “I don’t think it’s going to last long, and we’ll get all that back. But it is hard to watch, and it’s very difficult to endure,” he said. “For Native people, this ain’t our first rodeo. We’ve endured racism, we’ve been dehumanized since the very beginning, we’ll ride out this storm.”
The pushback: ‘We’ve won the battle but not the war’
The Guardian also identified dozens of instances in which parks staff turned Trump’s executive order on its head, using it as an opportunity to report existing signage that was disparaging to Native Americans and other marginalized groups.
Staff at the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas flagged an exhibit at the visitor center, writing that it “incorrectly states that the Texas Karankawa perished as a people and that they no longer exist. The Karankawa still exist and are an integral part of American history.”
At Horseshoe Bend national military park in Alabama, park staff noted that a stone monument for the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which resulted in the cession of 23m acres from the Creek Nation to the US, “disparages and incorrectly honors destruction of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and continues to cause tension and distrust with Tribal partners visiting the park”.
Other employees’ entries seem to subvert the ethos of the order. One anonymous park employee said their colleagues were “just going to pick something that’s minor and inconsequential and just put it there because I was told to put something in there”.
That includes flagging a sign about a drunken lockkeeper at the Chesapeake and Ohio canal national historical park who accidentally let water out of a 19th-century lock too quickly and sank a coal-carrying canal boat. “Could potentially be seen as denigrating the lockkeeper,” wrote the park employee.
Some parks flagged worn-out signs for physical wear and about 200 parks and historic sites wrote they had “nothing to report” and submitted no attachments.
The Trump administration’s censorship campaign has also been deeply unpopular with the public. Park visitors have submitted thousands of comments opposing the executive order, and a Pew survey found the majority of Americans in both parties say it’s important to discuss both positive and negative US history. Park advocates filed lawsuits opposing the executive order and Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation to protect park signage from removal.
In part because of these efforts, Trump’s censorship effort is now caught in legal limbo. In June, a federal judge blocked any further removals and ordered all signs that had been taken down to be restored.
“This Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths,” US district judge Angel Kelley wrote in a 63-page injunction. “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”
While advocates and park staff the Guardian spoke to say they are relieved by the decision, they’re hesitant to call it a full victory.
“We’ve won that particular battle, but I’m not sure we’ve won the war yet,” said Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The case could take many more months to wind through the courts as the Trump administration appealed Kelley’s decision a day after it was filed, said Wade.
‘A true American story’
At Mammoth Cave national park, a short hike leads to a clearing where about 40 members of the Bransford family are buried.
The area is completely wooded now, but it was once a bustling community; home to hundreds of Black and white families who lived in segregated neighborhoods, churches, farms and the Bransford Summer Resort, a sanctuary for Black visitors to the caves who were barred from staying at the hotels for white visitors.
But in 1941, when Mammoth Cave became a national park, everyone who lived within the boundaries of the park was expelled, their homes demolished to make way for the new park. Black guides were banned from working at the park, and Jerry Bransford’s great uncle lost his job as a cave guide. For decades, almost all traces of the Bransford family, save for the etchings of Mat Bransford on the wall caves 300ft below ground, were wiped away from history.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when Jerry, then in his 50s and living nearby, decided to reclaim his family heritage and become a park ranger at Mammoth Cave, that the story of the Bransford family was told again at the national park.
One of his proudest achievements was the restoration of the cemetery, now known as the Bransford Cemetery.
“I’ve done my best to tell America a true American story of people of color: that we worked there for 101 years, that they were sent away after it became a national park, and shortly after they left, it was as though they were never there,” Jerry said.
When Jerry thinks about his family’s legacy possibly being erased from history and Mammoth Cave a second time, he thinks about the pain that Mat, his great-great-grandfather, must have felt when his children, born into slavery, were taken away from him.
“What more do you want to take away from them?” he said. “The system has taken everything from them. So why would Mr Trump and his administration want to at least take away their story? Haven’t they given enough?”
The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at deleted-data@theguardian.com.
