Undoing History

In The Huntington’s vast collection is a letter written by George Washington during the final months of his presidency. Addressed to an obscure port inspector named Joseph Whipple, the letter details Washington’s efforts to re-enslave a young woman named Ona (sometimes Oney) Judge. Earlier that year, she had liberated herself by sneaking out of the president’s Philadelphia residence and boarding a ship bound for New Hampshire, where she joined a growing free Black community. Washington needed Whipple’s help “to restore the girl,” as he put it, to her former confinement as the personal slave of Martha Custis Washington. The president instructed Whipple to operate discreetly and lure Judge onto a ship under false pretenses. If she suspected their designs to return her to slavery, Washington wrote, “she would contrive to elude it.” Whipple responded four weeks later that Ona had, in fact, eluded his efforts. Despite the Washingtons’ continued attempts to return Ona to slavery, she remained free until her death in 1848.

In 2010, Ona Judge’s story became part of a new historical exhibit at the President’s House, the official residence of the U.S. president from 1790 to 1800. When it opened to the public, the site featured thirty-four signs and a multimedia display about the people who had lived and worked there: George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, and nine individuals enslaved by the Washingtons. Guided by a congressional resolution, the central theme was “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” 

The single panel dedicated to Judge’s story featured a two-sentence summary of her life, followed by two sentences in her own words describing her escape from slavery. 

Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where, for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.

As the new nation embarked on its journey of freedom, many enslaved people were emboldened to launch their own. The exhibit at the President’s House celebrated this inspiring message.

In January 2026, to comply with an executive order, the National Park Service removed all signs at the site related to the Black freedom struggle, including the panels about Ona Judge and the other enslaved Black residents of the President’s House.

The City of Philadelphia owned the site and, by legal agreement, had invested heavily in its development and upkeep, so it sued to have the signs restored. A preliminary ruling by Judge Cynthia M. Rufe painted the conflict in stark terms. 

As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto “Ignorance is Strength,” this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not. 

Rufe’s decision was not guided by party affiliation: she was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush. Instead, her confidence in the site’s interpretation rested on the historical scholarship that informed it and the careful, collaborative process that produced it. 

To most of the site’s three million annual visitors, this process remains invisible. This backstage effort can fuel the mistaken idea that such exhibits reflect not careful consensus but a radical reinterpretation of U.S. history.

Those of us who have contributed to NPS exhibits are most struck by how deliberate, cautious, and collaborative the work is: often frustratingly so. I was privileged to serve on a scholars’ panel tasked with researching and producing exhibits at Independence National Historical Park for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In addition to the President’s House, the park includes Independence Hall, where the Declaration was signed, as well as the Liberty Bell and the First and Second National Banks. 

At every level of input—NPS leadership, site interpreters, community stakeholders, city and state officials—published academic scholarship informed our work, both inspiring and constraining our recommendations. On the First National Bank committee, we drew from journal articles and books that analyzed finance and international trade, reconstructed the social worlds of wage laborers, detailed the experiences of enslaved and free Black Philadelphians, and discussed the importance of women’s economic activities.

When I served on the NPS committees for the Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park and Fort Monroe National Monument, we followed the same meticulous process. Years of discussion and debate preceded our deliberations, and reliable, often quite specialized, scholarship guided our conclusions. 

The President’s House exhibits also resulted from two decades of collaborative, if often contentious, discussion at the city, state, and national level, spanning four presidential administrations and many shifts in political power. The questions they pose come from visitors, descendants, students, and voting constituents. The answers they offer draw on decades of careful scholarship. 

To understand Washington’s letters about Ona Judge, for example, historians have culled through thousands of other letters, newspapers, account books, court filings, diaries, probate inventories, and much more. Experts then assessed this research in peer review, identifying new contributions, recognizing errors, and detecting distortions. The result is a rich library of resources—including recent books on Ona Judge, the Washingtons’ views on slavery, and the contested memory of those views—available to NPS committees and other stakeholders. Federal agencies also draw on similar research conducted by private foundations, including  Mount Vernon, the Museum of the American Revolution, and many others. 

Too often, we affirm the value of public humanities by contrasting it with academic scholarship. Public-facing work is virtuous, democratic, and accessible, whereas academic writing is indulgent, elitist, and obscure. This is a false dichotomy. Not only is there room for both, but meaningful public humanities work always rests on a foundation of sound scholarship. 

The story of Ona Judge and the ongoing battle over interpreting history at the Declaration’s quarter-century mark highlight the often-invisible links between public humanities and the peer-reviewed academic scholarship supported by The Huntington’s Research Division and published in the Huntington Library Quarterly. 

To make these connections more visible, we’ve added a new article category to the HLQ called “Early/Modern Connections.” These articles present original early modern research that has enabled, supported, or shaped a specific public humanities or public interest project. These essays do more than compare and connect the past and present. They must include an element of active public engagement. 

The first of these articles is “Black Aquatics: Early Modern Past, Present, and Future,” by Amanda Herbert and Kevin Dawson. Their research on Black aquatic culture is brought to life by the visionary art of Ebony Iman Dallas, who provided illustrated wooden puzzles for a community education program to address modern racial inequities in aquatic sports. By showing young people the importance of aquatic cultures in the African diaspora, they decenter the slave trade and offer youth other ways to imagine their connection to the water. 

This age of conflict and uncertainty makes our investment in peer-reviewed academic scholarship all the more urgent. It is the bedrock of the public humanities. 

Brett Rushforth is Editor in Chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly, the peer-reviewed early modern studies journal published by The Huntington’s Research Division. He is the author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2012) and, with Christopher Hodson, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (2026).