A federal appeals court has paved the way for the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit it removed at the President’s House Site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.
Thursday’s decision effectively discards a February injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, which included a series of illustrated panels about the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the executive mansion while he was president in the 1790s.
The panels were taken down, then partially restored, as part of a monthslong legal fight rooted in an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. Citing a 2006 agreement, the city sued the Park Service and the Interior Department in January after it abruptly removed the exhibit to comply with the order.
In its unanimous ruling, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the city does not have any “statutory, property, or contractual rights that empower it to curate the exhibits in the President’s House.” The judges also concluded that the Trump administration’s replacement panels, which NPS has posted online, are “full of historical context.”
Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is now remembered as the first "Juneteenth."
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has accused President Trump of fabricating a story that she "begged" him for a photo at the G7 summit, in a stunning public break between the two leaders once considered allies.
Imperial Germany famously signed a treaty under humiliating terms to end WWI at Versailles, codifying a surrender despite the fact that the war was overwhelmingly fought beyond its borders.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.
