Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
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By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold — and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made.
There is a dispatch from Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.
There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union.
And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world. … It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”
An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.
President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.
These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.
The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since
