Inside the Trump-approved American history museum on wheels coming to a town near you

BEL AIR, Md. — As I stood face to face with George Washington, he told me, “The fate of our country, the fate of liberty, is in your hands.” A few seconds later, he froze into the iconic pose of the Lansdowne portrait: right hand outstretched, left hand gripping the sword at his hip. It was like a scene out of “Night at the Museum.”

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AI-generated Washington — whose full speech runs about 2 minutes and 30 seconds — is the opening attraction of six “Freedom Trucks” on tour throughout the nation. The mobile museums are hitched to semitrucks and contained within specially-made trailers decorated with another famous painting of Washington, making the Delaware River crossing.

The project is part of Freedom250, a public-private partnership working in tandem with the White House’s Task Force 250 to carry out President Trump’s vision for the country’s semiquincentennial.

Although the trucks themselves lack overt political messaging, the organization that curated the exhibit, PragerU, has deep roots in the conservative education ecosystem, along with Hillsdale College, which also worked on the project. Although its full name is Prager University, the nonprofit is not an accredited academic institution, but a multimedia company. It has long been criticized in some academic circles for presenting a rosier, more sanitized version of the nation’s story than is historically accurate.

One PragerU video about Frederick Douglass from 2021, for instance, broadly claims the Founding Fathers always intended to end slavery. Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University in New York, called the assertion a “creationism-level untruth for the history curriculum.”

Laats, who studies cultural battles over schooling, is among those whobelieve PragerU’s aims are flawed.

“Telling children these false, just-so stories, it doesn’t make them more patriotic, it makes them more suspicious about the power structure,” he said. “You don’t make patriots, you make cynics.”

Though PragerU is backed financially by prominent conservatives, Marissa Streit, the company’s chief executive, said the Freedom Trucks are intended to be apolitical. PragerU, she told the Globe, was focused on teaching what is true and telling “the bigger picture of what kind of country it is that we’ve inherited. And that includes teaching the good and the bad.”

The Freedom Trucks largely follow a textbook narrative of the country’s founding. However, they also offer some perspectives on the American Revolution outside of the Founding Fathers.

Certain portions of the exhibit emphasize the roles of women, like Phillis Wheatley and Mercy Otis Warren, in shaping the nation and the contributions of Black people — both enslaved and free — to the war effort, and highlight certain Native American, Catholic, and Jewish figures from early American history. Even so, the belief that Christianity is inextricably linked to the nation’s identity, from its founding to core principles, takes precedent in some parts of the exhibit. Some Founding Fathers’ roles as idealistic luminaries also receive more emphasis than their roles as wealthy slave owners.

The truck I visited was parked outside of American Legion Post #39 in Bel Air, a northeast Maryland town of about 10,000 that’s most famous historical resident is John Wilkes Booth. It’s the kind of place where the police station, town hall, and volunteer firehouse are all right next door to each other.

Hundreds of people visited the attraction on a Wednesday in mid-May, with some taking off from work or school and traveling from as far away as Delaware or Pennsylvania to attend. About 50 to 60 people could fit inside the space at once.

Many attendees were clad in red, white, and blue. One man, who enthusiastically quizzed guests on their historical knowledge, wore a Continental Army uniform.

The truck was free to enter, but donations were accepted. Its crew had last stopped in Conway, N.H., before arriving in Maryland two days earlier. Many Freedom Truck destinations are small towns in counties that supported Trump in the 2024 election. In Harford County, which contains Bel Air, for instance, Trump received 55 percent of the vote. At the time of writing, no Freedom Truck has made a visit or is scheduled to stop in Massachusetts, where the American Revolution began.

The trucks’ destinations are chosen via an application process. Ray Bengel, commander of Bel Air’s American Legion post, said they requested to host a Freedom Truck “because the American Legion is all about Americanism and children and youth.” Bengel thought Bel Air’s chances of selection were slim because of its size, “but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. “We are very pleased.”

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A common sentiment among those interviewed by the Globe who attended the Freedom Truck in Bel Air that day, including Bengel, was a dissatisfaction with the historical narrative of the United States being taught in schools. Bengel denounced historical framing that he thinks lacks reverence for the risks the country’s founders took during the revolution.

PragerU has long sought to reframe historical education in schools around American exceptionalism.

“As an educator, I saw that we were teaching young Americans to hate our country,” Streit, a former schoolteacher, said. “So I have been thinking about being very involved in re-establishing great patriotism in education in America for several years, and I’ve been very focused on it for the last three years.”

Founded in 2009 by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and the executive producer of his show, Allen Estrin, PragerU has waded into the culture war playing out over American K-12 education. Streit pointed to the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the writings of socialist historian Howard Zinn as “examples of problems that I think have been brought into the American classroom.” Meanwhile, several conservative-leaning states, including New Hampshire, have approved PragerU content for use as supplemental educational material in public schools.

Laats,who once taught at public middle and high schools in Milwaukee and St. Louis,said PragerU’s content relies on a “harmful premise” that “average public schools have been taken over by left-wing ideology.” The evidence, he continued, does not support such an assertion.

A sprawling 2024 study conducted by the American Historical Association found no evidence of widespread indoctrination or politicization in classrooms after surveying more than 3,000 middle and high school US history educators and reviewing educational material from all 50 states.

Even so, Secretary Linda McMahon’s Department of Education has embraced PragerU as it seeks to bring American education in line with Trump’s agenda. Last year, the company produced a “Founders Museum” exhibit for the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in partnership with the Education Department that featured AI-generated videos of prominent figures from early American history.

Streit said her organization was tapped to work on the Freedom Trucks because the White House was pleased with the founders exhibit. The Freedom 250 commission, she said, pitched the mobile museum idea to PragerU, which Streit agreed to help curate on the condition that the company not be compensated with government funds. Instead, the content — which Streit said cost about $1 million to produce — was gifted to the commission.

“They recognize that there’s something unique that PragerU was able to do for the American people,” said Streit, who has been with the company since 2009. “And that is not just teach the truth and not just teach what is wholesome and patriotic — which are very important things, very significant things — but also do it in a way that actually engages a child of every age, whether you’re 4 or 104 years old.”

In that vein, many of the Freedom Truck’s features are interactive, such as a touch pad that allows attendees to sign the Declaration of Independence or a 10-question test that determines whether the taker would have been a patriot or a loyalist.

The latter feature was a favorite of 11-year-old Michael Moritz (a patriot), who finished his school day early to visit the truck with his parents. “That was a fun quiz to take,” he said, adding it was “definitely” more entertaining than classroom learning.

While the exhibit begins with an address from the nation’s first president, it ends with a call-to-action in a prerecorded video from the current one.

“I hope,” Trump says, sitting at the Resolute Desk, “you will join me in helping to make America’s 250th anniversary a year we will never forget.”

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