By Ramin Ganeshram
As the government continues its attacks on various American institutions, its real goal is to own and control how American history is told. Large museums, libraries, and theaters are chronically underfunded and underendowed. They depend on government funding and are being hard hit.
That’s why we should look to the nation’s smallest museums and culture centers. These organizations may receive some government dollars—usually from their state humanities councils. But small libraries and museums are out of the reach of the current administration’s intrusion for a simple reason: they usually don’t receive much, if any, government funding. And there are a lot of them: Of the 35,000 museums in the United States, the majority are considered “small”. Local, privately funded historical museums, libraries, and art galleries have the power to defy any erasure of our history’s inconvenient truths.
We have almost 20,000 history museums in our nation. About half of them operate with a budget of less than $100,000 per year. Despite their size, many have impressive archival collections. It’s in these important collections that we can learn how everyday people recorded their stories and revealed the world they lived in. These records are a form of living history and testimony – unedited and uncensored for any future audience or political moment.
This is important. As the federal government erases holistic history in places like the National Archives, Library of Congress, and The Smithsonian, small organizations are holding tens of thousands of pages of historic proof, from pre-colonial times to the present.
Local history museums, historical societies, and historic homes do their work on a shoestring, often depending on dedicated volunteers. Yes, we can march, and we can boycott, but we can also do something powerful and immediate to preserve our own history and protect our democracy: We can donate money, give time, and loan expertise to small, local museums and libraries. These institutions are the gathering places for our own voices, our own authority.
Year over year, surveyed Americans say that museums are among their most trusted resources—rating higher than the media and even family and friends. Only libraries get more trust. The ability of smaller, local institutions to shape discussions of cornerstone American issues should not be underestimated. They hold America’s historical receipts.
Getting involved with private, local museums will provide desperately needed fuel to keep them up and running and open. Boosting small cultural organizations in your area helps you influence the range of ideas you want to see explored right where you live.
Certainly, some of these organizations may espouse the exclusionary values that the administration wants to fund. As a board member of a state humanities council, I know from my counterparts in conservative states that they enjoy widespread support from their Republican elected officials.
But it would be foolish to tie the urgency for local funding to small institutions to political goal posts or support for a progressive versus conservative interpretation of history. In a democracy, we should all be able to ideologically disagree yet co-exist.
Instead, enthusiastic individual support for local institutions is about fighting authoritarianism and government overreach. For everyone who values fact-based historical inquiry the time is now: We need to put our money where our mouths are and support the little guys holding the line.
250 years ago, the shot heard ‘round the world at the battle of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, pitted a small group of radical upstarts against the tyrannical might of an insurmountably huge enemy. We again find ourselves fighting an authoritarian leviathan in a war that is less about ideological disagreement and squarely about erasing truth.
We won the right to our own nation with grassroots organization, dedication and the support of the everyday person. We can do it again.
In the culture war over who gets to “own” history–now as then–the winner will not emerge from a clash of titans. They will emerge from battle between David and Goliath.
And we all know how that story turned out.