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The fragility of history

Torn away brown paper reveals the eyes of Pauli Murray. She is a Black woman who was a civil rights lawyer and eventually a priest.

History is a fragile thing. Writing history is about constructing a narrative based on the evidence we have of the past. It depends on people keeping records and making them available.

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four

One reason women’s history exists as a topic within the wider field is how often those records were not kept or were not made available. Writing about women in history is about expanding the evidence base. It’s about broadening the story we tell of ourselves. So it is awful to watch a purge of women from a national history in real time.

Cryptologic: a case study in hiding the past

The National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland, USA, is dedicated to “the people who devoted their lives to cryptology and national defense”. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong focus on codebreaking during World War 2 and the National Security Agency (NSA) as it went into the Cold War.

Women codebreakers worked at the NSA. British codebreaker Betty Webb was so good at breaking Japanese codes at Bletchley Park that she was sent to DC to help the US service. The US Marines employed between 400 and 500 Native American men as code talkers. They used codes developed from indigenous languages to transmit tactical information. The people who helped the NSA defeat fascism are highlighted on panels in the museum’s roll of honor display.

Some time between 20 January 2025 and 2 February 2025, someone in the museum took a roll of brown paper and covered up the wall panels.

Photo of the Hall of Honor at the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. Someone is standing at an interactive display. On either side of it, large sheets of plain brown paper are hung up, covering two display panels.
Photo by Gen. Michael Hayden, taken on 2 February 2025, showing the display boards covered by brown paper

Gen. Michael Hayden, a former Director of CIA and NSA, noticed and posted about it around 10am on 2 February.[i] By 2pm, the museum was posting about the display decision. Vaguely.

“The National Cryptologic Museum is dedicated to presenting the public with historically accurate exhibits and we have corrected a display mistake.”[ii]

Eric Williams, a retired USAF Intel Analyst, checked the brown paper had come down the next day. [iii]

The same wall, now with the brown paper removed, revealing the boards are titled ‘Trailblazers’ and feature women and people of colour. Photo by Eric Williams.

This shows how fragile the place of women and people of colour is in America’s telling of its history. This was done by a museum that focusses on people’s role in breaking fascism. It’s hard to parse the doublethink required. Some commentators think the brown paper was malicious compliance as it made such a big “look what we can’t show you” statement. The museum reversed its “display mistake” because a powerful (white male) ally called them out publicly. But now time and effort will have to go in repeatedly checking the display board are still there. And how many other erasures will not be reversed because no-one with power calls them out?

Stopping the erasure of people from history

It’s hard to keep track of where history is being erased, covered up or rewritten. There was an image of blank walls at one federal organization which I forgot to bookmark and so have already lost. Just a few examples include:

  • Pauli Murray has been removed from the National Parks website..[iv] We’ve used Pauli in the feature image at the top of this post.
  • The National Parks also removed all mention of the trans women who led the Stonewall riot.[v]
  • The Defense Intelligence Agency removed displays about both women and Black people. In a museum that can only be accessed if you have clearance.[vi]
  • Elementary school libraries removing all books about slavery and the civil rights movement.[vii]

As soon as it became apparent what was happening, people set the Internet Archives’ bots trawling all the US government websites so that a record of what was once there is kept. But a museum that’s behind security clearances? Examples like that are much harder to record. It might seem impossible for things to be lost now, but anyone trying to find information out from less than a century ago knows how easy it is for evidence to vanish. History is a fragile thing.

Individual actions – whether that’s using your power as a former director of the NSA or instructing IA to crawl a site – will save a lot of the fragile history that is being so carelessly thrown aside. Future historians will thank every person who saves the past for the future.

[i] Gen M Hayden post of 2 Feb 2025 (BlueSky)

[ii] National Cryptographic Museum vague post of 2 Feb 2025 (Facebook)

[iii] Eric Williams post of 3 Feb 2025 (Bluesky)

[iv] Serqet post on 15 Feb 2025 (Bluesky)

[v] Park Service erases ‘transgender’ on Stonewall website, uses the term ‘LGB’ movement (NPR)

[vi] Intel Agency Confirms It Removed So-Called DEI Items From Its Secured Museum (HuffPo)

[vii] Books mentioning slavery, civil rights removed from shelves at Fort Campbell schools  (ClarksvilleNow)

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Nellie Bly and the incognito ‘stunt girl’ reporters

A close up of the young Nellie Bly. She is wearing a high collar dress and has a short fringe. Text next to it reads "Nellie Bly goes around the world 25 January 1890"
Bly is wearing a travelling outfit of a dress with a long skirt and tight bodice. Over it is a floor length check coat. She has a bag in one hand a is raising her cap with the other.
Nellie Bly in her travelling clothes

On 25 January 1890, American journalist Nellie Bly stepped off a train in New York and into a huge crowd that was waiting for her. She had just become the first person to travel around the world in less than eighty days. Not only had she done it, she had beaten her rival, Elizabeth Bisland, by four days.

The 1890 race around the world reveals that Bly, perhaps the most famous newswoman then writing, was not unique. From 1887 through to the middle of the 1890s, the ‘stunt girls’ made front page news. They wrote it, and they became it.

So in this post we’re looking at the rise and fall of stunt journalism, and the women involved in it.

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A brief history of Ms.

The front cover of Ms Magazine from 1972. It shows a giatn Wonder Woman walking down an American street. The text reads 'A brief history of Ms - how women's titles have changed over the centuries.

It’s over 50 years since the first standalone newsstand edition of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine was published (1 July 1972). And yet women still have conversations about boring life admin in which they must answer the question “Miss or Mrs?” with “It’s Ms, actually.” So here’s a brief history of the title, for when someone assumes you’re using it to indicate you’re divorced (yes, that really still happens).

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Charlotte E Ray and 143 years of progress

A modern illustration of how Charlotte E Ray might have looked when she graduated. She is a Black woman with a mortar board on a piled up hairdo. Text reads Charlotte E Ray becomes a lawyer 23 April 1872.

The first African-American woman to be Attorney General of the USA, Loretta Lynch, was appointed on 23 April 2015 in Washington DC. The very same day, 143 years earlier in 1872, Charlotte E Ray became the first African-American woman admitted to practice law in the USA.

Sometimes history throws up these little co-incidences. This one gives us the opportunity to look at two very different law careers available to a Black woman in the USA.

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Eight famous women singers

Camilla Williams wearing a fur and holding flowers. She is a black woman with dark hair in a wave. Text reads "Camilla Williams debuts at the New York City Opera - May 1946".

On 15 May 1946, Camilla Williams made her debut as Cio-Cio San in the New York City Opera’s production of ‘Madame Butterfly’. She was the first black woman to sign a contract with a major US opera company. This month, we take a quick look at eight of the most iconic female singers in opera history.

First up, it’s worth noting that opera was hugely popular from the 1700s to the 1960s. These famous women singers were as popular in their time as Beyonce or Lizzo now. It’s also worth noting that opera singers were seen as disreputable and scandalous in the 1700s, and this social attitude continued into the 1800s. As ever, powerful, financially independent women using their voices had to be cast out in some way.

This month we’re focussing on female popular singers from the 1830 onwards. Maybe we’ll visit the Covent Garden of the 1700s another time…

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Sixty years of Silent Spring

Rachel Carson standing in front of a bookcase in 1962. Overlaid is the cover of her book Silent Spring

Olga Owens Huckins watched the birds falling lifeless all around her property in Massachusetts in January 1958. It was just after the area had been sprayed with DDT from a plane. She wrote to the Boston Herald and sent a copy of her letter to her friend Rachel Carson. Carson was a marine biologist and a best-selling nature writer who was already very concerned about the use of man-made chemicals, especially pesticides, on the natural world.

Carson already had three best-selling non-fiction books: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. She added her friend’s letter to the evidence she was building for her next book.

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