Trump's latest attack on history

NY Times -  In Philadelphia, a few steps from the Liberty Bell, there stands a ghost house. It consists of partially reconstructed red brick walls, an empty door frame and windows and, etched on a free-standing stone slab, the names of nine enslaved people who served George Washington there.

The President’s House, as the open-air site is known, was the seat of the executive branch of the United States’ fledgling democracy from 1790 to 1800, when Washington and then John Adams lived there. But since Jan. 22, when workers arrived unannounced with crowbars and pried all 30 interpretive signs off the walls, it has become a front in the red-hot political battle over American history.

The National Park Service, whose leadership ordered the removals, says it was merely complying with President Trump’s executive order last March calling for the removal or revision of displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

The actions at the President’s House, whose signs had been flagged as problematic during a review of all sites ordered last June by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, were intended to ensure “accuracy, honesty and alignment with shared national values,” Elizabeth Pease, a Park Service spokeswoman, said in a statement.