When History Is Under Review, We Must Tell It
I just read that Donald Trump wants a full investigation of the Smithsonian museums — essentially demanding they align with his interpretation of history. WTF?! That move isn’t just politically charged — it’s a warning shot. Because whoever controls the archives controls the narrative.
That is exactly why history matters — not just as record, but as story, memory alive in our dinner table conversations, our journals, or our social media feeds. We witness, we capture, we narrate — and sometimes, we do it against the tide.
Take Marion Stokes. She was driven by the fear that history could—and would—be rewritten. So she recorded an astonishing 306,600 hours of television over 35 years across tens of thousands of VHS tapes. She captured the daily churn of news, sitcoms, commercials—everything most networks erased to save space and money. She even operated eight VCRs at once, with family members swooping home to swap out tapes in between dinners. When she died in 2012, her archive — about 71,000 tapes — was donated to the Internet Archive, launching a vital project of public memory. Her work is living proof that “someone has to.”
Marion’s obsession wasn’t random. It’s a giant metaphor: when institutions become political battlegrounds, every personal record can be revolutionary preservation.
Thankfully, she wasn't alone. Across the globe, community archivists are racing to preserve stories that institutions neglect or suppress.
In Atlanta, the Web Archiving School (WARC) trains “memory workers” to save Black history from erasure. As Wired reports, this is a lifeline amid federal efforts to sanitize museums and curtail diversity initiatives. Archivists are answering with decentralized digital vaults and care-based preservation.
In Latin America, queer communities are reclaiming their past through the Queer Memory Archive (Peru), Trans Memory Archive (Argentina), and Transmasculine Archive (Mexico). These aren’t academic vaults—they’re labor of love, collecting fanzines, flyers, diaries, and intimate ephemera—unspooling stories that the state would rather erase. This is preservation as resistance.
Closer to home, the History Project in Boston curates Massachusetts LGBTQ history—from the Stonewall 50 markers to oral histories and grassroots exhibits.
In Queens, the Queens Memory Project invites residents to submit stories, photos, even audio, building a borough-wide digital memory museum.
And there’s the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, preserving home movies and rare footage from small-town Texas, one cultural fragment at a time.
Why do all this? Because archives are never neutral. They decide whose lives are remembered — and whose are forgotten. So long as institutions are vulnerable to political pressure, the real safeguard of history is collective memory.
That’s why I started VideoOut back in 2016. We traveled across the U.S., interviewing LGBTQ+ individuals — holding a mic to beautiful stories that otherwise fade away. It’s simple: stories deserve space. We digitize them. We share them. We publish them to YouTube and Spotify, building a repository of lived truth. Any one of us can do it — on our phones, hard drives, in personal journals.
What else can we do to archive history — our way?
Record local events—town halls, Pride parades, union meetings, street organizing. It’s the stuff that makes democracy.
Oral histories: Interview elders, immigrants, community leaders. Share on Substack, Anchor, or your blog.
Personal archives: Photograph ephemera—posters, zines, protest signs. Scan handwritten letters.
Social media time capsules: Use Threads, TikTok, Instagram Highlights — date-stamped posts that chronicle daily life and identity.
Community archiving workshops: Use guides like the Community Archiving Workshop Handbook to learn how to organize group preservation efforts.
Contribute to collaborative archives, like Densho for Japanese-American WWII experience, The South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), The Disability Visibility Project, The Digital Transgender Archive, The Outwords Archive for LGBTQIA+ elders, The Generations Project for LGBTQ+ people of all ages, and I’m From Driftwood for more LGBTQ+ stories.
Join data rescue: Groups like the Data Rescue Project and Internet Archive are rescuing deleted government and civic data. And yes, even depictions of drag performances and queer events.
Every one of us holds a portal to the past — a memory, a camera, a voice.
If Trump’s plan succeeds, the Smithsonian may align with one distorted perspective. But what he can't erase are the millions of private stories we’re still telling. Across dinner tables, across social networks — all of us, quietly preserving the messy and beautiful truth of who we were.
That is history worth fighting for. Let’s voice it, chronicle it, archive it — for us, and generations yet to come.