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

“The system has taken everything from them. So why would 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,

“Not only does this undermine the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” “What more do you want to take away from them?” he said.

“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.

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.

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.

to recognize the life and legacy of the 14-year-old Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. 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.”

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,

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.

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.

Based on 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.

“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.”

Developing park signage was typically a deliberative, months-long process that involved consultations with scientists, archaeologists and historians, Hayden said.

“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.

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 were more removed signs they didn’t account for.

Deleted data Part II
‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
Critics say the Trump administration is trying to rewrite and whitewash history by removing and altering scores of signs on public lands www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i... 🧵

‘A sanitized view of America’:...

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.

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.

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”.

“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?”