In March 2025, when the Trump administration announced Executive Order (EO) 14253 “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History” which targets and censors American art and erases established American histories, I immediately purchased the domain name www.restoringtruthandsanitytoamericanhistory.com. This domain name will now be used for a website that hosts a collection of intricate drawings that depict the images and histories that the administration is aiming to erase.

Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History is an art project that uses graphite & charcoal drawings to make photorealistic copies of the historical and contemporary images that tell the histories which the EO is targeting. Additionally, the project uses the repetition of images to illuminate the cycles of the histories that keep resurfacing. These drawings are then uploaded on to the www.restoringtruthandsanitytoamericanhistory.com website where they become an archive and discoverable within web search engines like Google Images. 

A few examples of the targeted images and histories are “The Scourged Back”, an infamous image from 1863 of an escaped enslaved man named Peter that was flagged for removal from educational displays about the history slavery at Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah, GA; the removal of a World War II display that honored Black soldiers from a US military cemetery in the Netherlands; and, the re-installment of the Confederate Albert Pike Memorial in Washington, DC after it was toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. 

These are just a few of the incidents resulting from an EO that claims there is “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This project reclaims these targeted histories from the administration’s revisionist assault by literally drawing from history to amplify and reveal the truth about the erasures that are happening before our eyes.

The site will be updated with new drawings on an ongoing basis.

Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History is an art project by Daniel Bejar.