Welcome to our NEW website everyone!!!

Hi everyone!!!  I just wanted to take a few minutes to share with and welcome everyone to our new website for the Voices For Historical Justice.  In the face of what we are now experiencing, the actual removal of the history of underrepresented groups like the Slavery Exhibit at the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park and the newest directive by the Trump Administration to remove or change exhibits on indigenous history at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, a number of us decided it was time to take this next step for our group by creating this website.  So please, peruse our new website.

The “About Us” section has submenus for “Our Mission” which lists our goals and mission statement for the group, “Our Founders” where the founders of the group will have a little bio, and “Our Actions” which will show any of the actions we’ve taken as a group.

The “Getting It Right” section is for specific historic sites.  The submenu for “Historic Sites Doing it Right” is for exactly how it sounds, the sites who are doing the work and telling the stories of indigenous, enslaved, and Black/African American peoples and any other underrepresented groups.  The “Watch List” is for any sites who are doing a marginal job at telling these narratives and need to have eyes on them to see which way they will go, if they will cave in to the demands of the current administration, or if they will do what is right.  The “Naughty List”, well you get the point.  If any of you know of any sites you’d like to add to any of these three lists, reach out to me and we’ll discuss the site and which list they belong on and why.

As historic sites are under the crosshairs of having full, accurate and inclusive histories changed or eliminated, I want to start an archive of our own of interpretive signs at sites, especially those who may be under threat, such as National Park Service sites or those receiving federal funding.  Again, my ask here is that you reach out to me with good, clear images showing the wording and detail of interpretive signs, panels, exhibits that should be preserved.  I only ask that if you reach out to me with any, I only want images of signs or panels giving the history of the enslaved, Black/African American history, indigenous, or other underrepresented groups.  White historic figures are not at risk, all others are.

The Blog portion of our website will be for any blog posts we put out.  It could be news items, articles, or anything of interest to our group.  If you would like to make a blog post, just reach out to me and we’ll see what we can do.  If a post is going to be an article on something history oriented, I just ask that you include a list of references for your work at the end of any writing you would like to put up in a post.

There is a menu for suggested readings.  I have already started a list of good reads, so if there is a book you think should be included on this list, again, just reach out to me and we can add it to the list.

And finally, I have included a listing of “Links” for any groups, historic sites, blogs, or other items of interest that people can check out.  Again, reach out if you know of something else we can include on here.

At the bottom of each page of our website, there is a subscription button where you can enter your email to get notifications any time something is posted on the Blog section of our website.  So please, subscribe to keep up with anything posted on our website.  Also, I have commenting turned on so people can comment on blog posts, so please feel free to post you comments on our postings.

And I wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who has joined our group.  When I first conjured up the idea of this group, I told myself, nobody is gonna follow along with me on this, I’m an unknown in the field of history.  But I went forward anyways by reaching out to the 40, 50 plus historians I had connected with over the years.  And to my surprise, our founding group of members got behind me and supported this idea, so to the founding members, a HUGE thank you for rallying around me!!!  Since starting the group in August of 2025, we all have been inviting friends, family, and other historians we are associated with to our group and it has grown more than I imagined it would.  We have members spread out across the country, from coast to coast.  So a HUGE thank you to everyone for this as well.  Let’s keep growing our group, our following, our movement.  Because that is what we are doing, starting our own movement, together, united as one for a common cause.  Continue to invite other friends, colleagues, history lovers, etc.  And if you have anything you’d like to contribute to the website, hit me up.  Thanks again everyone.

Todd Long