A professor challenged the Smithsonian. Security shut the gallery.

On a Monday afternoon this winter, 64-year-old historian James Millward climbed the steps of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery with a “little stack of handouts, like a good professor,” and no sense of the drama that was about to unfold.

He had heard that when the museum swapped out the president’s portrait in January, it also removed a placard mentioning Donald Trump’s impeachments and the Jan. 6 insurrection. For Millward, a scholar of Chinese history, well-versed in the censorial methods of that country’s Communist Party, the development stirred a familiar feeling: unease at seeing “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared.”

So Millward did what he knows best. He designated the gallery his classroom and made museumgoers his students. Where the new, abbreviated label failed to educate, he played substitute teacher. Stationed next to the freshly mounted portrait, which shows the president scowling over his desk, Millward offered printouts of the old wall text to interested visitors. They stated plainly that Trump was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”

Millward called it “guerrilla teaching.” He was at the Portrait Gallery as an educator but also as co-founder of Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, a group that last year spent thousands of hours documenting every corner of the Smithsonian, to track any changes made as Trump administration officials assert control over the content of the museums. “I think it’s really important,” he says, “to show that the people are noticing.”

Millward’s lesson was short-lived. After half an hour, a uniformed guard appeared and told him he could not hand out fliers. Millward asked for a clarification on the museum’s rules, which he didn’t see posted. The guard mentioned a policy prohibiting distribution of literature and called in reinforcements. Within minutes, Millward estimates, a group of eight to 10 guards had gathered in the gallery. They were wearing different uniforms, he says, some with handcuffs and guns. Soon, they cleared the room of visitors and closed off the exhibition.

Millward felt a surge of adrenaline as he found himself on the front lines of a battle playing out across the country - about what constitutes U.S. history, how it’s told, and who gets to tell it.

But in that moment, the operating theater was much smaller: just the guards, the history professor and a host of U.S. presidents, peering down at the scene from their frames on the walls.

Millward didn’t expect to cause a disturbance, though the Georgetown University academic understands as well as anyone that information can be seen as guide or a threat, depending on how it’s interpreted.

The early months of the second Trump administration brought a rush of executive orders, with wide-ranging aims, such as ending diversity initiatives, axing a landmark environmental accord and altering the requirements for citizenship. The directives quickly became more granular and soon included calls for museums, monuments and national parks to be scrubbed of “divisive narratives.”

Grassroots efforts to push back on the administration bubbled up throughout the summer of 2025, including some aimed at documenting the existing exhibits of museums and historical sites to preserve the current content.

Chandra Manning, a U.S. history professor at Georgetown, sent an email to her colleagues encouraging participation in one such initiative, “Save Our Signs.” Millward responded, noting that the way the administration was talking about the nation’s history recalled the Chinese Communist Party slogan “Tell China’s story well,” which has long been used to call for extensive propaganda campaigns.

When the Trump administration sent out a letter requesting a more comprehensive review of eight Smithsonian museums in August, Millward and Manning decided they needed to do more.

Now nearing its 180th anniversary, the sprawling Smithsonian is often dubbed “America’s attic,” and for much of its history, it’s been treated as one - a place to store the nation’s treasures, accessible to visitors but largely untouched by the turbulence of current events.

At least, that was the case until the Trump administration started issuing directives to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology” and asserting Americans “will have no patience” for any museum that is “uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history.” For some, what felt like a fixture started to seem fragile.

Millward and Manning soon banded together with a graduate student named Jessica Dickinson Goodman to form Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. In a blistering seven weeks in the late summer and early fall, the group recruited hundreds of volunteers and tasked them with documenting every wall text in all publicly accessible Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo.

Suddenly, every bit of signage took on new significance. Snapping photographs became an act of protest. And a band of ordinary visitors became stewards of the world’s largest museum complex.

The group came away with an arsenal of more than 50,000 photos to serve as a reference, when and if censorship struck. They hoped they wouldn’t have to use it.

“It would have been great if our project was a waste of time and in fact nothing changed,” Manning said. But, she adds, “That’s not what did happen.”

Citizen Historians is part of a growing group of organizations scouring websites, signage, datasets and documents, treating the banal with the care of conservators as they resist the Trump administration’s efforts to recast the past.

Among them, the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) seeks to record “changes since January 2025 that threaten the historical record.” The Data Rescue Project tracks public datasets, while Tracking Government Information monitors federal government information and resources.

Save Our Signs, the group that sparked Manning and Millward’s engagement, asks locals to photograph signs at their nearby national park sites and then aggregates them into a database. That work has proved invaluable in recent weeks, as several signs related to Native Americans, slavery and climate change have been removed.

“All of that information, we’re going to need now and in the future, to be able to recover from this, if possible‚” says Jenny McBurney, government publications librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of Save Our Signs.

Kirsten Delegard, a public historian at the University of Minnesota and another co-founder, has found herself asking why she’s focused on signage while her city is grappling with the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti amid Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests. But reflecting on it made her only more committed. “The two are related,” she says. “We need history right now, as much as we need diapers and food and rent money, and people to be no longer terrorized. History is what provides our moral compass.”

It was that sense of purpose that kept Dickinson Goodman up until 4 a.m. one early morning in October, just before the government shutdown would close the Smithsonian. Citizen Historians had pushed volunteers to finish documenting the museums in their waning hours, and Dickinson Goodman needed to be sure they had everything. “I had a technical way to check that, but I really wanted to see with my own eyeballs,” she says. So, after putting her toddler to bed, she clicked open on each of what she estimates was a thousand folders.

It was a hodgepodge of images, a digital mosaic of an institution whose 21 museums and zoo contain, to scratch a tiny fraction of the surface: the Star-Spangled Banner, Edward Hopper paintings, 159-million-year-old fossils, World War II-era fighter jets, Japanese folding screens, elephants and Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Dickinson Goodman laughs when she recalls telling volunteers to take an image of each object, and someone assigned to the zoo asked, “When you say ‘the object,’ do you mean … the lion?”

In those predawn hours, as Dickinson Goodman reached the final folder of their marathon of photos, “I started crying because I was so glad that we’d gotten it.”

“It meant,” she says, “that no one could take it away.”

It might not have felt that way for Millward, as the number of guards in the Portrait Gallery exhibit room multiplied.

When the professor and his co-founders established Citizen Historians, they wanted not just to help the public identify abnormal changes to the Smithsonian but to do so in a way that allowed ordinary people to get involved. Within two weeks of its founding, the group had recruited hundreds of volunteers. Retirees, students, schoolteachers, scholars, former museum professionals, ex-diplomats - anyone, really, who was concerned about the independence of the nation’s attic and determined to do something about it.

Among them was Katherine Pruitt, a 70-year-old Smithsonian alum and self-described “early adopter” of Citizen Historians, who was charged with documenting the presidential portrait galleries at the NPG, ground zero for Trump-era changes. It was a world away from the side of the Smithsonian she knew from her work: the bird and mammal specimens of the National Museum of Natural History. Still, combing through each wall text sparked memories of her days handling collections decades ago.

“You can’t leave a skull over on one desk and the leg bones over on another desk. It all had to be well-documented and accurate,” she says. “If you made mistakes, it would potentially go down in history.”

Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University who has studied censorship, says the work of groups such as Citizen Historians could prove critical.

“Censorship is not just one moment,” he says. “It’s not just some external authority coming and saying, ‘This is going to be removed.’”

Documentation is a way to fight back. Because, he says, “the worst kind of censorship is the censorship we never know has happened.”

When the Portrait Gallery removed the Trump label, Millward’s organization knew exactly how the historical text had previously appeared. That made it easy to reproduce on his tidy handouts.

At the museum that day, the guards first said he could not distribute “solicitations” next to the portrait. When he pushed back and said it was just old wall text, they told him holding demonstrations was prohibited, as was handing out any form of literature. The Portrait Gallery website says visitors cannot bring “placards, signs, or banners” inside the museum.

“We all stayed calm and had a frank exchange of views,” says Millward, though inwardly he felt on edge. A high-level supervisor eventually arrived to speak with him, then the guards reopened the galleries. A spokesperson for the Portrait Gallery told The Washington Post that the museum’s officers “followed protocol.”

Millward could have stuck around. “They weren’t ushering me out,” he says, but “I didn’t feel like standing there at that point.” Still, he was rattled by the disproportionate nature of the response. Struck, he says, “that something as dramatic as clearing the whole gallery could happen simply by me trying to tell people what had been on the wall the week before.”

In the end, the professor left with his fliers. And the presidents, in their frames, remained at attention.