NASHVILLE ‒ Slipping inside the semitrailer, visitors find a wall-to-wall display of the watershed moments leading up to the American Revolution and its biggest battles.
Tucked in a less visible spot, another exhibit tells visitors the "foundational principles of America are rooted in Western and Judeo-Christian values."
This 53-foot mobile museum is one of six "Freedom Trucks" traversing the country as ambassadors ofPresident Donald Trump's Freedom 250 program.
At a stop in Nashville during the National Religious Broadcasters annual gathering in February, Marissa Streit, chief executive of the conservative media organization PragerU, was showing visitors through the two-room museum her company helped design.
Streit said references to America's Judeo-Christian roots were an intentional and deliberate part of the truck design, intended to help counterbalance an approach to the nation's history that she said has misled the American public.
"How do we give that experience to people today who want to truly know what's going on and not learn about what America looked like based on an interpretation of some woke agenda," she said. "We've been talking about how intentionally taking the Bible out of the classroom has effectively ruined America's education system."
Streit sees her work as counteracting a partisan presentation of U.S. history. But critics of PragerU and their allies argue the opposite is true and say these new trucks will spread misleading accounts of American history that bolsters a Christian nationalist agenda.
The new mobile museums hit the road months after Trump accused the government-run Smithsonian Institution of being too "woke" and launched a review of its museums aimed at rooting out "divisive ideology" and promoting "American exceptionalism."
But watchdog groups and historians have criticized Trump's Freedom 250 as a taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign.
"The Trump administration is very specifically choosing people to be the face of the Freedom 250," said Warren Throckmorton, an expert on Christian nationalism and the movement's narratives about U.S. history. "The face of these initiatives are evangelical Christians."
A public-private alliance amid conflict over partisan history
Freedom 250, a subsidiary of the National Park Foundation, was created in December by the White House to fund Trump's vision for the country's milestone birthday. Since then, it has drawn accusations of pushing a right-wing, Christian view of America.
The mobile museums are the latest flashpoint. PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that creates educational, pro-American videos, partnered with Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan, to develop the exhibits for Freedom 250. The six museums are traveling to public schools, state fairs and community events across eight states throughout the year
Neither PragerU nor Hillsdale received funding from the federal government for this work, Streit said, though the government has spent money on the project.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, gave Freedom 250a $10 million grantfor the project in December, according to federal spending data.
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Building a mobile museum
The idea for the Freedom Trucks was originally devised to mimic the bicentennial "Freedom Train," a traveling history exhibit that crisscrossed the nation.
A spokesperson for Freedom 250 said Hillsdale and PragerU were chosen for their "extensive experience and expertise creating educational content for students focused on the American Founding," and their offer to create the material for free-of-charge for the government.
PragerU's civics curriculum has received approval from 10 states for local schools to use,according to WBUR, a Boston public radio station.
Hillsdale also produces a civics curriculum for its charter school network, and has been a pioneer in the movement to reinterpret American history from a Christian perspective. Hillsdale president Larry Arnn chaired Trump's 1776 Commission, which was largely seen as a response to the 1619 Project, a New York Times-initiated effort to examine slavery's role in America's origins. By contrast, the 1776 Commission's view of history emphasizes key victories, like the Revolutionary War.
Themes of liberty, responsibility and moral fortitude within PragerU's civics curriculum, a key resource behind the mobile museum exhibits, offer a more "balanced point of view," Streit said.
USA TODAY asked John Fea, a historian of American religion at Messiah University, to review photos from some of the exhibits.
He said most of the information was factually accurate, but the information provided about Thomas Jefferson's view of slavery, "is an interpretive choice meant to advance a particular vision of the American founding."
That exhibit, titled "The Promise of Liberty," referenced how Jefferson "called the slave trade 'a cruel war against human nature itself.'" But it does not note that Jefferson personally enslaved 607 men, women, and children, many of whom he chose not to free when he died.
Other interactive exhibits allow visitors to talk directly to an AI-generated video of George Washington and sign their name at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence. QR codes direct visitors to PragerU's online content.
Another exhibit invites people to select characters from different groups that persevered despite persecution: "Native Americans; Soldiers & Spies; Freed Blacks & Slaves; Women; and Religious Leaders." A profile of Congregationalist minister Samuel West praised his May 1776 "rousing sermon on the right of colonists to rebel against their colonial governors."
Fea said the West profile is accurate, but he is surprised that West received such significant attention given his stature as a historical figure.
"The issue here is not so much the content of the displays, but the choices about who to include and why," Fea said.
Karissa Waddick, who covers America's 250th anniversary for USA TODAY, can be reached at kwaddick@usatoday.com
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:What Trump's 250 program conveys about U.S. history with mobile units
NASHVILLE ‒ Slipping inside the semitrailer, visitors find a wall-to-wall display of the watershed moments leading up to ...
