How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump’s culture war
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/how-the-smithsonian-became-the-latest-front-in-trumps-culture-war/
Above all, though, the commission’s recommendations faced resistance among the museum’s curators to the sort of great-man-of-history approach that Brooks and others were hankering for. There had been a trend in museum science away from this, and away from straight chronology. “There was this whole museum movement to get away from a march through time, to a more episodic or specific sort of story,” John Gray, who succeeded Glass in 2012, told ProPublica. “It wasn’t done to get away from the story; it was finding a way to get people interested.”