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I teach history in Connecticut, but I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, where my interest in the subject was sparked by visits to local museums. I fondly remember trips to the Fellow-Reeves Museum in Wichita, Kansas, and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. A 1908 photograph of my great-grandparents picking cotton has been used as a poster by the Oklahoma Historical Society. This love of learning history continued into my years as a graduate student of history, when I would spend hours at the Smithsonian Institutions National Air and Space Museum learning about the history of human flight and ballooning. As a professor, Ive integrated the institutions exhibits into my history courses. The Trump administration, however, is not happy with the way the Smithsonian Institution and other U.S. museums are portraying history. On March 27, 2025, the president issued an executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which asserted, Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nations history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. Under this historical revision, our Nations unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Trump singled out a few museums, including the Smithsonian, dedicating a whole section of the order on saving the institution from divisive, race-centered ideology. Of course, history is contested. There will always be a variety of views about what should be included and excluded from Americas story. For example, in my own research, I found that Prohibition-era school boards in the 1920s argued over whether it was appropriate for history textbooks to include pictures of soldiers drinking to illustrate the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. But most recent debates center on how much attention should be given to the history of the nations accomplishments over its darker chapters. The Smithsonian, as a national institution that receives most of its funds from the federal government, has sometimes found itself in the crosshairs. Americas historical repository The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 thanks to its namesake, British chemist James Smithson. Smithson willed his estate to his nephew and stated that if his nephew died without an heir, the moneyroughly US$15 million in todays dollarswould be donated to the U.S. to found an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. An 1816 portrait of British chemist James Smithson by Henri-Joseph Johns. [Image: Wiki Commons] The idea of a national institution dedicated to history, science and learning was contentious from the start. In her book The Stranger and the Statesman, historian Nina Burleigh shows how Smithsons bequest was nearly lost due to battles between competing interests. Southern plantation owners and western frontiersmen, including President Andrew Jackson, saw the establishment of a national museum as an unnecessary assertion of federal power. They also challenged the very idea of accepting a gift from a non-American and thought that it was beneath the dignity of the government to confer immortality on someone simply because of a large donation. In the end, a group led by congressman and former president John Quincy Adams ensured Smithsons vision was realized. Adams felt that the country was failing to live up to its early promise. He thought a national museum was an important way to burnish the ideals of the young republic and educate the public. Today, the Smithsonian runs 14 education and research centers, the National Zoo and 21 museums, including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was created with bipartisan support during President George W. Bushs administration. In the introduction to his book Smithsonians History of America in 101 Objects, cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin talks about how the institution has also supported hundreds of small and large institutions outside of the nations capital. In 2024, the Smithsonian sent over 2 million artifacts on loan to museums in 52 U.S. states and territories and 33 foreign countries. It also partners with over 200 affiliate museums. YouGov has periodically tracked Americans approval of the Smithsonian, which has held steady at roughly 68% approval and 2% disapproval since 2020. Smithsonian in the crosshairs Precursors to the Trump administrations efforts to reshape the Smithsonian took place in the 1990s. In 1991, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which was then known as the National Museum of American Art, created an exhibition titled The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920. Conservatives complained that th museum portrayed western expansion as a tale of conquest and destruction, rather than one of progress and nation-building. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the exhibit represented an entirely hostile ideological assault on the nations founding and history. The exhibition proved popular: Attendance to the National Museum of American Art was 60% higher than it had been during the same period the year prior. But the debate raised questions about whether public museums were able to express ideas that are critical of the U.S. without risk of censorship. In 1994, controversy again erupted, this time at the National Air and Space Museum over a forthcoming exhibition centered on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50 years prior. Should the exhibition explore the loss of Japanese lives? Or emphasize the U.S. war victory? Veterans groups insisted that the atomic bomb ended the war and saved 1 million American lives, and demanded the removal of photographs of the destruction and a melted Japanese school lunch box from the exhibit. Meanwhile, other activists protested the exhibition by arguing that a symbol of human destruction shouldnt be commemorated at an institution thats supposed to celebrate human achievement. Republicans won the House in 1994 and threatened cuts to the Smithsonians budget over the Enola Gay exhibition, compelling curators to walk a tightrope. In the end, the fuselage of the Enola Gay was displayed in the Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum. But the exhibit would not tell the full story of the planes role in the war from a myriad of perspectives. Trump enters the fray In 2019, The New York Times launched the 1619 project, which aimed to reframe the countrys history by placing slavery and its consequences at its very center. The first Trump administration quickly responded by forming its 1776 commission. In January 2021, it produced a report critiquing the 1619 project, claiming that an emphasis on the countrys history of racism and slavery was counterproductive to promoting patriotic education. That same year, Trump pledged to build a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live, with 250 statues to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. President Joe Biden rescinded the order in 2021. Trump reissued it after retaking the White House, and pointed to figures hed like to see included, such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Betsy Ross, Sitting Bull, Bob Hope, Thurgood Marshall and Whitney Houston. I dont think there is anything wrong with honoring Americans, though I think a focus on celebrities and major figures clouds the fascinating histories of ordinary Americans. I also find it troubling that there seems to be such a concerted effort to so forcefully shape the teaching and understanding of history via threats and bullying. Yale historian Jason Stanley has written about how aspiring authoritarian governments seek to control historical narratives and discourage an exploration of the complexities of the past. Historical scholarship requires an openness to debate and a willingness to embrace new findings and perspectives. It also involves the humility to accept that no oneleast of all the governmenthas a monopoly on the truth. In his executive order, Trump noted that Museums in our Nations capital should be places where individuals go to learn. I share that view. Doing so, however, means not dismantling history, but instead complicating the storyin all its messy glory. The Conversation U.S. receives funding from the Smithsonian Institution. Jennifer Tucker is a professor of history at Wesleyan University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued an urgent alert about dengue fever, a painful and sometimes deadly mosquito-borne illness common in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Some 3,500 travelers from the United States contracted dengue abroad in 2024, according to the CDC, an 84% increase over 2023. This trend is expected to continue, the agency said, noting that Florida, California, and New York, in that order, are likely to see the biggest surges this year. On Thursday, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency put out a similar warning, noting that there were 900 cases of travel-related dengue in the U.K. in 2024, almost 300 more infections than the preceding year. The two reports relayed a similar array of statistics about dengue, its symptoms, and rising caseloads. But the U.K. Health Security Agency included a crucial piece of information that the CDC omitted: It noted why cases are breaking records. The rise is driven by climate change, rising temperatures, and flooding, it said. In the past, the CDC has readily acknowledged the role climate change plays in the transmission of dengue feverbut the political conditions that influence scientific research and federal public health communications in the U.S. have undergone seismic shifts in the months since President Donald Trump took office. The new administration has purged federal agency websites of mentions of equity and climate change and sought to dismantle the scientific infrastructure that agencies like the CDC use to understand and respond to a range of health risksincluding those posed by global warming. Last week, ProPublica reported that the National Institutes of Health, or NIHthe largest source of funding for medical research in the worldwill shut down all future funding opportunities for climate and health research. It remains to be seen whether ongoing grants for research at this intersection will be allowed to continue. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his agency plans to cull 10,000 people from its workforce, including new cuts at CDC, an agency that was established in 1946 in order to prevent a different mosquito-borne illness, malaria, from spreading across the U.S. Taken together, the suite of directives will prevent the U.S. and other nations whose scientists rely on NIH funding from preparing for and responding to dengue fever at the exact moment when climate change is causing cases of the disease to skyrocket. The abrupt subversion of the personnel and institutions tasked with responding to a threat like dengue bodes poorly for future health crises as climate change causes carriers of disease like mosquitoes, fungi, and ticks to expand their historical ranges and infiltrate new zones. The disease pressure in the last couple of years is very dramatic and its going in one directionup, said Scott ONeill, founder of the World Mosquito Program, a nonprofit organization that infects mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria to fight disease in 14 countries. For example, Brazilthe country that consistently registers the highest number of dengue casesrecorded a historic 10 million cases last year. The country reported 1.7 million cases in 2023. The two types of mosquitoes that most often infect humans with dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, thrive in the warm, moist conditions made more prevalent by rising atmospheric temperatures caused by fossil fuel combustion. The vast majority of annual dengue cases are asymptomatic, but about 25% of people infected, depending on the population, develop symptoms like fever, headache, and joint pain. A small percentage of those cases result in severe sickness, hospitalization, and even death. The number of severe dengue infections corresponds roughly to the size of the pool of people infected every year. In 2023, when there were 6 million total dengue infections, 6,000 people died. In 2024, a year when there were more than 13 million cases registered globally, over 8,000 people died. There is no cure for dengue. Patients in wealthier countries generally fare better than patients in developing regions with limited access to medical interventions like blood transfusions and places where waves of dengue patients overwhelm already-strained healthcare systems. Two dengue vaccines are available in some countries, but both have serious limitations in terms of efficacy and how long they confer immunity. The NIH began taking climate change and health research seriously in 2021, and the institutes have funded dozens of studies that probe every aspect of the climate-dengue connection since. NIH-funded researchers have sought to understand how warmer temperatures shift the geographic ranges of Aedes mosquitoes, which factors predict dengue outbreaks, and how communities can protect themselves from dengue following extreme weather events. These studies have taken place in the southeastern U.S., where dengue is becoming more prevalent, and internationally, in countries like Peru and Brazil, where dengue is a near-constant threat. The NIH has also funded studies that bring the world closer to finding medical and technological interventions: more effective vaccines and genetically engineered mosquitoes that cant develop dengue, among other solutions. Disease doesnt have national borders, said an American vector biologist who has received funding from the NIH in the past. She askednot to have her name or affiliated academic institution mentioned in this story out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. Im worried that if were not studying it, were just going to watch it continue to happen and we wont be prepared. Americans arent just bringing cases of dengue fever home with them from trips abroad; the disease is also spreading locally with more intensity in warmer regions of the country and its territories. Last March, Puerto Rico declared a public health emergency amid an explosion of cases on the island. By the end of 2024, Puerto Rico registered over 6,000 casespassing the threshold at which an outbreak officially becomes an epidemic. More than half of the known infections led to hospitalization. Close to 1,000 cases have been reported there so far this year, a 113% increase over the same period in 2024. California and Florida reported 18 and 91 locally-acquired cases of dengue, respectively, last year. California registered its first-ever locally-acquired case of dengue in 2023. Dengue is already found in many places in the U.S. that have never seen this disease before, said Renzo Guinto, a physician and head of the Planetary Health Initiative at the Duke-NUS medical school in Singapore. To combat this emerging climate-related health threat, U.S. scientists must collaborate with others working in dengue overseas. With no resources and capacity, how can such collaboration occur? There are limited non-government sources of funding for climate and health research. The money that is available to American researchers is primarily offered by private foundations like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. The grants these philanthropies offer annually pale in comparison to the $40 million Congress made available annually through the NIH for climate and health research in the two years before Trump took office. Researchers will be forced to compete for a small pool of funding in the coming years, which will likely lead to fewer studies and less innovation in the years to come. The end result will be that much less of this work would be donewe would all tell you to the detriment of Americans long term, said the vector biologist. As dengue spreads with more intensity in the countries where it is already common and slips across borders into zones like North America where the disease is still comparatively rare, its clear countries need to expand their arsenals of disease-fighting weapons. But the U.S. appears to be leading a charge in the opposite direction, with thousands of lives at stake. Were at a time when we need acceleration of innovation and solutions to very pressing global problems, said ONeill, whose organization receives funding from governments around the world, including the U.S. Its not the time to let ideology drive science rather than let science drive itself. This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
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Most of us know the general (albeit simplified) story: Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov used a stimuluslike a metronomearound the dogs he was studying, and soon, the hounds would start to salivate. They had learned that the sound meant food was coming. The phenomenon, now known as classical conditioning, became one of modern psychologys foundational discoveries. It’s an unconscious process where a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a naturally occurring stimulus, eventually leading to a connection between the two. The dogs, seeing the researcher who often brings them food or hearing the noise of the cart on its way, would immediately know they were about to have a meal. Flash forward 120 years: my dog and I are riding through San Francisco in a self-driving car. Ive taken Waymos autonomous vehicles dozens of times, often with my 9-year-old chiweenie, Poppy, nestled on my lap. She usually naps peacefully, facing inward, oblivious to the world outside. Near the end of each ride, the car makes a familiar ding-dong chime, followed by a womans voice reminding me to take my phone, keys, and wallet. Poppy, unfazed, would remain in a deep sleep until the car stopped, I unbuckled my seatbelt, and picked her up to get out. Back to the world of smells and fresh air! Lately, Ive noticed something strange: As soon as the ding sounds, Poppy wakes up, turns around, and readies herself at the door without my helpevery single time. Is this . . . Pavlovs Waymo? As a serious journalist in pursuit of all the hard-hitting truths, I emailed the veterinary team at Bond Vet. The short answer to my not-so-serious question? Yes. “In practical terms, the sound acts as a cue, prompting her anticipation to leave. This behavior develops because the sound repeatedly coincides with the end of the ride, and the reward of getting out reinforces her response,” Dr. Lisa Lippman, director of virtual medicine at Bond Vet, said in an email. “Dogs are incredibly perceptive and often pick up on routines and environmental cues like this, its a great example of how they learn and adapt!” Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found in 2021 that common household noises, like a microwave beep or the chirp of a smoke detector, can cause a dog anxiety. Thankfully, Poppy doesn’t seem very anxious about the car’s noise (although humans are notoriously bad at sensing a dog’s stress or real emotions). But it made me think of the constant notifications and dings of our world. At the same time as our pets, we as humans are being classically conditioned. The microwave beep alerts us that we’re about to be rewarded with food, the “tudum” sound when you open the Netflix app prepares us for entertainment, the Waymo chime let’s us know it’s almost time to get out. Brands especially have utilized classical conditioning to associate their product with an emotion. “When we play sound feedback for Waymo riders, our guiding philosophy is to be friendly and helpful,” Waymo’s Head of Design and Customer Research Ryan Powell said over email. “That means playing sounds that feel connected and familiar, but not intrusive. We want to be thoughtful about how and when we play sound, so that riders can rely on these signals for their safety and comfort. Sometimes we’ll play sound followed by a voice explanation for more detail.”
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