Trump wants to overhaul the Smithsonian. Volunteers are fighting to preserve it.

WASHINGTON — Fresh off a week of heavy criticism from conservatives, staffers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History who clocked in for work last Monday morning encountered about a dozen people on the National Mall who wanted a word.

But they weren’t there to add to the accusations against the museum — quite the opposite. They held signs with phrases such as “Keep the Smithsonian Independent!” and “Protect History,”while singing songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful.”

The demonstration was organized by a group called Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. Since August 2025, hundreds of volunteers with the grouphave taken more than 50,000 photos and videos documenting the art and artifacts on display at the Smithsonian’s 21 museums in Washington, D.C., and New York City, plus its traveling exhibits. The digital archiveencapsulates everything from artworks by Banksy and Basquiat, the Wright Brothers’ first plane, photos of lynchings from the Jim Crow era, and the desk Thomas Jefferson used to pen the Declaration of Independence, to the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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Their motivation, members of the group say, is to provide a check on an administration set on an unreasonably narrow view of history. On July 24, Trump had issued an executive order dictating that signs be erected near the museum to warn visitors “about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History,” the latest action in an escalating battle between the White House and the Smithsonian Institution.

“I want my children to understand the full American experience,” Jessica Dickinson Goodman, a grad student with two young kids and one of the group’s cofounders, told the Globe. “I don’t need the government getting between me, my kids, and our own history.”

The White House did not return a request for comment.

The conflict over how the Smithsonian frames history kicked into another gearon Independence Day, when the White House Domestic Policy Council released a accusing leaders of the National Museum of American History of using the country’s story “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” Trump has often criticized the institution for adopting a posture toward the United States he views as overly negative.

Then, on back-to-backdays in mid-July the history museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, was called to testify before two separate House panels. Republican lawmakers grilled her over exhibitions they found objectionable, such as ones that explored gender identity and LGBTQ culture and history, both of which had not been on display in years.

The GOP complaint is that themuseum has “become infected by a woke ideology that’s seeped into public displays, educational materials, and planning documents,” said Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican and chairman of a subcommittee that hosted one of the hearings.

The White House report, congressional hearings, and executive order made clear the fight over the Smithsonian was just beginning. Those new threats, said Chandra Manning, also a cofounder of the citizens group, motivated the group to expand its advocacy.

“Now, it is both a documenting community — a community creating an archive — [and]it’s also an outside-of-the-museum source of support for the museum,” Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University, explained.

It’s why the group has recast its focus not just on the contents of the museums, but on the people who keep the institutions functioning.

“If the point of all of this White House and congressional pressure is to produce a chilling effect, to get into the heads of the people who work at the Smithsonian,” Dickinson Goodman said, “we wanted to counter it with a warming effect, trying to remind them that there are people who deeply respect and appreciate their professionalism and their hard work.”

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian has also expanded its documentary work beyond museum collections. The group now has campaigns to documentthe Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, and its ranks have swollen to about 700 volunteer photographers.

“If it could happen at the Smithsonian, it could happen somewhere else, too,” Manning said. “The urge to edit the story, to control culture — that seems to extend far beyond the walls of the Smithsonian, at least for this administration.”

The White House’s fixation on the nation’s premier assembly of museums has been brewing for over a year.

In March 2025,Trump signed an executive order directing Vice President JD Vance — in his role as a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents — to remove exhibits promoting “improper ideology” and appoint citizen members to the board who will advance administration priorities.

Following that executive order, Manning launched thegrassroots initiative to document Smithsonian exhibitions.

“It wasn’t just a case of the administration wanted happy history and the Smithsonian told sad history,” Manning explained. “It was that the administration was asking for false history that I thought was damaging because, one, it would prevent us ever understanding what really happened because it was so far removed from evidence. But two, it seemed to be a version that was intent on editing out certain groups, certain people, certain experiences, and the very existence of disagreement, which has so often been central to how history has happened in the United States.”

Fellow Georgetown history professor James Millward joined Manning, and the two sent emails seeking help with the project. Dickinson Goodman, a graduate student at Georgetown completing a foreign service degree, received one such solicitation and, drawing on her past experience as a political organizer in California, helped give structure to the mission.

Each of the 21 museums was assigned acaptain responsible for leading a subsection of the small army of volunteers. Dickinson Goodman said she hasn’t even met many of the volunteers in-person.

Over the course of about seven weeks from August to October 2025, Dickinson Goodman, Manning, Millward, and about 200 other volunteers spent hours inside and outside Smithsonianmuseums documenting exhibits and artwork. Most of their archive isn’t currently available to the public, but it is stored on hard drives and online systems. The group is working on printing photos, too.

Manning called the project “a super low-tech way of creating a crowdsourced archive of the Smithsonian as it existed last fall.”

“That low barrier of entry,” she added, “was the really important thing. I was really invested in making it as easy as possible for people to participate because so many people were feeling appalled at what was going on, but not sure what to do about it and looking for an entry point.”

Though the Museum of American History has borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s criticism, Manning said it was imperative to document every Smithsonian museum, because “the target today might not be the only target tomorrow.”

“The Smithsonian, in its entirety, is the national treasure that we really are trying to steward and care for,” she explained. “It really does represent just the vast wealth of human wisdom, of human knowledge, of human endeavor.”

Although the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal assistance to the Smithsonian — which accounts for about 60 percent of its $1.25 billion yearly operating budget — the institution has so far managed to resist the White House’s more extreme wishes, given its Board of Regents is technically independent from the executive branch. If it continues to withstand the pressure, that’s all the better in Dickinson Goodman’s book.

“One of our highest hopes as a project,” she said, “is that this archive — in the end — will be useless.”