Ive spent 25 years at historic museums. Smithsonian should tell of Americas greatness

The Smithsonian Institution is sometimes called the nations attic. That description is inadequate. An attic stores things. The Smithsonian does something far more consequential: It helps Americans understand who we are.

That responsibility carries particular weight as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary and the Smithsonian prepares for new leadership. The transition comes amid an intense debate over how the Smithsonian presents American history. A White House review criticized the National Museum of American History, arguing that ideological concerns have displaced an understanding of history as a shared national inheritance.

Smithsonian leaders and historians have defended the institutions scholarly independence and warned against allowing political power to dictate how history is told. The answer cannot be choosing one of those impulses and ignoring the other.

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Outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch recently said the Smithsonian must show both the light and the dark. He has also described America as an ideal as much as a place — an aspiration toward liberty, fairness, justice and equality.

But has the Smithsonian been telling the American story fairly?

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The harder question is one of proportion: How should Americas national museums put the light and the dark together into an honest account of the country?

I have spent much of the past quarter-century helping govern museums and historic institutions in Virginia. That experience has convinced me that historical integrity requires more than factual accuracy. It requires proportion, context and perspective.

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Americas national museums should tell our history honestly, including our shortcomings, contradictions and occasions when Americans failed to live up to the principles proclaimed at the nations founding.

But those failures should not become the organizing principle through which the American experience is understood.

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Viewed in proportion, the American story is extraordinary.

A collection of colonies declared that human beings possess rights governments do not grant. Americans then built an enduring constitutional republic around representative government, individual liberty and the rule of law. Those ideas changed human history.

The nation they produced survived civil war, expanded freedom and political participation, welcomed generations of immigrants, became an industrial