Few initiatives of the Trump administration more seriously undermine our understanding of the nation’s past than Executive Order 14253 from March 27, which promises “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments.”

The order directs the Interior secretary to cleanse all National Park Service sites of any signage that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” and instead “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” The Park Service staff was also instructed to purge gift shops of books that could be construed as critical of any American. In a similar vein, the Smithsonian Institution was ordered to remove “improper ideology” from its properties to assure they reflected “American greatness.”

Unwilling to depend on park personnel to enforce the patriotism mandate, the Trump administration is enlisting park visitors to report potentially offending displays and ranger talks that present an insufficiently sanitized account of American history.

On June 9, acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron instructed regional directors to “post signage that will encourage public feedback via QR code and other methods that are viable” concerning anything they encounter at a park site that they believe denigrates the nation’s history. (It is worth noting that when queried about the QR code directive, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed to know nothing of the mandate, although he signed it on May 20.) How will the Trump administration respond if a visitor uses one of the mandatory QR codes to file a complaint?

And that is just the beginning. The Trump administration has also made clear it would like to eliminate entire sites that are not “National Parks, in the traditionally understood sense.” That means targeting those features that lack the grandeur of Yosemite and the Grand Tetons: smaller parks, sites and memorials, many of which honor women and minorities.

Generally lacking soaring redwoods or massive gorges, these sites — many in urban areas where Trump’s revisionist history has not caught on — would seem to describe places in California such as César Chavez National Monument outside Bakersfield, Manzanar National Historic Site and Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond.

Trump and his ahistorical myrmidons — he just mused that the Civil War ended in 1869 — regularly display an abysmal ignorance of basic American history. In their view, such federal (and presumably state) sites should present only a simplistic view of our complex 249-year history, one that virtually ignores the contributions and struggles of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Even before we see how many “tips” the Park Service’s invitation elicits from visitors eager to rat on rangers, the wording of the executive order itself is chilling. Any signage or lecture that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” — and who is to say what constitutes disparagement? — must be replaced with rhetoric that emphasizes “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Needless to say, the many sites that tell the stories of civil rights and anti-slavery struggles, the Civil War, the role of immigrants, the battles for labor rights and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people are going to have a challenging time ensuring they in no way offend those willing to acknowledge only uninterrupted “greatness” of the American story. Sometimes our greatness has been manifested by our progress toward a more perfect union — and that story cannot be told without mentioning imperfections.

One need not have a PhD in history to appreciate the dire threat presented by these efforts to replace historical scholarship with uncritical flag-waving. Historians have an obligation to challenge myth, to uncover obscured stories, to give voice to those who were unable to fully participate in earlier eras of the American story because of their race, ethnicity, gender or viewpoints.

That is why our government has protected sites including Ellis Island (which President Lyndon B. Johnson added to Statue of Liberty National Monument), Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and Stonewall National Monument (both recognized by President Obama). Trump’s Orwellian orders seek to undo a half-century of scholarship that revealed a far more complex and nuanced history than the simplified versions taught to generations of schoolchildren.

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Fortunately, professional historians have not been cowed like many university leaders, law firms and others who have shamefully capitulated to Trump’s assault on free speech and intellectual integrity. A March statement from more than 40 historical societies condemned recent efforts to “purge words, phrases, and content that some officials deem suspect on ideological grounds [and] to distort, manipulate, and erase significant parts of the historical record.”

The national parks consistently rate as one of the most popular features of American government. Neither their rangers nor their exhibits should be intimidated into parroting a sanitized and distorted version of the nation’s past. As the historians declared, “We can neither deny what happened nor invent things that did not happen.” Americans should use those QR codes to send a clear message rejecting efforts to manipulate our history to suit an extremist ideological and political agenda.

John Lawrence is a visiting professor at the University of California’s Washington Center and a former staff director of the House Committee on Natural Resources. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

You may have noticed that the 100th anniversary of the so-called “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, has rolled around this month, with various offerings, notably my colleague Ron Grossman’s excellent recent story, which informed me, among many things, that the town’s main street “took on a carnival atmosphere. Rival trainers brought chimpanzees to town —  including a celebrated simian named Joe Mendi, who wore a plaid suit and a fedora hat. Vendors hawked toy monkeys and Bibles. Shop windows had monkey-theme displays.”

Read that story and perhaps you too will be compelled to dive deeper into the past. The simplest way is to watch the 128-minute 1960 movie based on the events that took place, mostly in a sweltering courtroom, from July 10-21 in 1925.

I did that, and “Inherit the Wind” is a great movie. Adapted from a successful play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and based on real events, it is dominated by those towering actors Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. They portray, respectively, opposing attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, though they’re given the names Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady.

See what I mean by “based on.” Still, Amazon touts the movie as the “thrilling recreation of the most titanic courtroom battles of the century,” hyperbolically ignoring a trial the year before, when Darrow took on the defense of killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago. (There’s a pretty good movie of that too, 1959’s “Compulsion”).

The trial, more formally called the Scopes trial, or the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, involved a high school teacher, John Scopes, who was accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools.

After watching “Inherit,” I did some further digging and feel fortunate to have learned some encouraging things about Scopes. For instance, “He did not capitalize at all on his celebrity,” said John Mark Hansen. “He had offers of tens of thousands of dollars to go on vaudeville stages and talk about the trial. Instead, he came to the University of Chicago to further his education, never seeking attention.”

Hansen is a longtime University of Chicago political science professor and Hyde Park resident. He is also a talented writer, and his “Evolution on Trial” story in the university’s magazine makes for enlightening and lively reading.

Among the other things I learned:

Darrow, the principal defense attorney, knew many University of Chicago scientists and professors, because for years, living in an apartment on 60th Street near Stony Island Avenue, “he hosted an informal biology club … directing discussions on biology, religion and evolution,” Hansen writes.

He recruited some of these folks to testify at the trial, and they stayed in “a big Victorian house on the edge of Dayton,” which is described as “ancient and empty … now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists,” Hansen writes. “It was called the Mansion, Defense Mansion, and, inevitably, the Monkey House.”

Scientists, lawyers and supporters of John Scopes assembled on the steps of the “defense mansion” outside of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial in July 1925. The defense mansion was a Victorian house where the defense team and witnesses stayed during the trial. The scientists did not get a chance to testify at the trial. (Chicago Herald and Examiner)

Scopes decided to study geology at the University of Chicago. His tuition toward earning a doctorate was paid for by a grant and other donations. But when he applied for a third year to finish his studies, the president of another school that administered the fellowships refused to consider his application, saying, “As far as I am concerned, you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.”

And so he did, fading away into life as a working geologist, Hansen tells me, living in Texas and Louisiana. He did return to the University of Chicago campus for a conference in 1960. When asked about the 1925 trial, Hansen writes, “Scopes had little to add. ‘I hope that I don’t ever have to go through something like that again.’”

“Some of the issues of the trial still echo,” says Hansen. “Ever debated is the role of religion in public school classrooms, as is the question ‘Who controls what gets taught in school?’”

Bryan died only days after the Scopes trial and Darrow lived until 1938, the most famous lawyer in the world then, and arguably still. Reading Hansen’s fine story and watching “Inherit the Wind” put Darrow solidly in my mind and compelled me to go to see a small and pretty bridge in Jackson Park. It sits behind the Museum of Science and Industry, named in Darrow’s honor and dedicated in 1957 by relatively new mayor Richard J. Daley. Closed to pedestrians since 2013, it’s sadly in bad shape, recently having been listed as one of Preservation Chicago’s 7 Most Endangered Buildings for 2025, noting, “As necessary maintenance continues to be deferred, the bridge is increasingly vulnerable to further disrepair. If conditions worsen, demolition and removal are possible outcomes.”

Atty. Clarence Darrow talks at the Scopes trial in 1925. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

I also found the time to read Darrow’s 20,000 some-word closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb sentencing, the words that saved those two men from execution.

Here are some of them: “You may hang these boys; you may hang them, by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. … I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

A Northwestern Medicine research lab has found a usually harmless virus in brain samples from Parkinson’s patients. The idea that Parkinson’s could be linked to a virus had been theorized for years, but this is the first study to pinpoint a specific virus as more common in Parkinson’s patients.

“The message that we want to give to the general public is, it opens a new field of investigation, something that we didn’t know about,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, Northwestern’s chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology and lead author of the study.

Parkinson’s disease is a movement disorder caused by the loss of neurons that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain. Why these neurons break down is unknown, but it’s thought that this breakdown is caused by many factors, both genetic and environmental.

The team used a tool called ViroFind, which is able to test samples for all known viruses that infect humans much quicker than the usual one-at-a-time “brute force” method. The lab found human pegivirus, or HPgV, in 5 of the 10 Parkinson’s-affected brains they tested, and none of the brains without Parkinson’s.

“Fifty percent of any population having this virus would be very, very high,” Barbara Hanson, the lab’s post-doctoral fellow, said. Estimates calculate HPgV as being present in about 5% of blood donors in North America, and people with healthy immune systems generally lose the virus within two years of exposure. It is not known to cause disease in humans, so most who catch the virus will never know they had it.

Before this study, Hanson said, HPgV had not been found in human brain tissue. It was understood to primarily “live” in blood.

“For this virus to be present in the brain, there must be a reason for that,” Koralnik said.

This doesn’t mean that the virus itself is a trigger for Parkinson’s, though. It could be that an as-yet unidentified genetic mutation that makes people susceptible to Parkinson’s, also allows for the virus to spread throughout the body differently than in people without the mutation.

And even if further research shows HPgV as a direct cause of Parkinson’s, both Koralnik and Dr. Danny Bega, medical director of Northwestern’s Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center, said people shouldn’t necessarily worry about getting HPgV.

A patient likely has to encounter a couple of different factors before they develop Parkinson’s, Bega said. He puts it in terms of “hits” — a hit could be genetic, or it could be environmental, such as exposure to a virus or pesticide. These “hits” build up over time until there are enough factors to cause the neuron degeneration specific to Parkinson’s.

It’s possible that this is why Parkinson’s risk increases with age, Bega said. The longer you live, the more of these “hits” you take, as you encounter different Parkinson’s risk factors throughout your life.

“I always caution people who try to blame their Parkinson’s on one thing,” he said. “Rest assured, it’s never one thing that you could have done or should have done differently.”

The work to treat and hopefully one day prevent Parkinson’s is being done through finding these factors and eliminating them one by one. “The more targets that we have, the more likely we are to be able to achieve a treatment that actually can slow things down,” Bega said.

By HILLEL ITALIE

Alan Bergman, the Oscar-winning lyricist who teamed with his wife, Marilyn, for an enduring and loving partnership that produced such old-fashioned hits as “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?,” “It Might Be You” and the classic “The Way We Were,” has died at 99.

Bergman died late Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, family spokesperson Ken Sunshine said in a statement Friday. The statement said Bergman had, in recent months, suffered from respiratory issues “but continued to write songs till the very end.”

The Bergmans married in 1958 and remained together until her death, in 2022. With collaborators ranging from Marvin Hamlisch and Quincy Jones to Michel Legrand and Cy Coleman, they were among the most successful and prolific partnerships of their time, providing words and occasional music for hundreds of songs, including movie themes that became as famous as the films themselves. Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett and many other artists performed their material, and Barbra Streisand became a frequent collaborator and close friend.

Blending Tin Pan Alley sentiment and contemporary pop, the Bergmans crafted lyrics known by millions, many of whom would not have recognized the writers had they walked right past them. Among their most famous works: the Streisand-Neil Diamond duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” the well-named Sinatra favorite “Nice ’n’ Easy” and the topical themes to the 1970s sitcoms “Maude” and “Good Times.” Their film compositions included Ray Charles’ “In the Heat of the Night” from the movie of the same name; Noel Harrison’s “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from “The Thomas Crown Affair”; and Stephen Bishop’s “It Might Be You,” from “Tootsie.”

FILE – Honorees Alan, left, and Marilyn Bergman arrive at the ASCAP Film and Television music awards in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Tuesday, May 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)

The whole world seemed to sing and cry along to “The Way We Were,” an instant favorite recorded by Streisand for the 1973 romantic drama of the same name that co-starred Streisand and Robert Redford. Set to Hamlisch’s tender, bittersweet melody, it was essentially a song about itself — a nostalgic ballad about nostalgia, an indelible ode to the uncertainty of the past, starting with one of history’s most famous opening stanzas: “Memories / light the corners of my mind / misty watercolor memories / of the way we were.”

“The Way We Were” was the top-selling song of 1974 and brought the Bergmans one of their three Oscars, the others coming for “Windmills of Your Mind” and the soundtrack to “Yentl,” the Streisand-directed movie from 1983. At times, the Academy Awards could be mistaken for a Bergman showcase. In 1983, three of the nominees for best song featured lyrics by the Bergmans, who received 16 nominations in all.

The Bergmans also won two Grammys, four Emmys, were presented numerous lifetime achievement honors and received tributes from individual artists, including Streisand’s 2011 album of Bergman songs, “What Matters Most.” On “Lyrically, Alan Bergman,” Bergman handled the vocals himself. Although best known for their movie work, the Bergmans also wrote the Broadway musical “Ballroom” and provided lyrics for the symphony “Visions of America.”

Their very lives seemed to rhyme. They didn’t meet until they were adults, but were born in the same Brooklyn hospital, four years apart; raised in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, attended the same children’s concerts at Carnegie Hall and moved to California in the same year, 1950. They were introduced in Los Angeles while working for the same composer, but at different times of the day. Their actual courtship was in part a story of music. Fred Astaire was Marilyn’s favorite singer at the time and Alan Bergman co-wrote a song, “That Face,” which Astaire agreed to record. Acetate in hand, Bergman rushed home to tell Marilyn the news, then proposed.

Bergman is survived by a daughter, Julie Bergman, and granddaughter.

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Bergman had wanted to be a songwriter since he was a boy. He majored in music and theater at the University of North Carolina, and received a master’s from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he befriended Johnny Mercer and became a protege. He and Marilyn at first wrote children’s songs together, and broke through commercially in the late 1950s with the calypso hit “Yellowbird.” Their friendship with Streisand began soon after, when they visited her backstage during one of her early New York club appearances. “Do you know how wonderful you are?” was how Marilyn Bergman greeted the young singer.

The Bergmans worked so closely together that they often found themselves coming up with the same word at the same time. Alan likened their partnership to housework: one washes, one dries, the title of a song they eventually devised for a Hamlisch melody. Bergman was reluctant to name a favorite song, but cited “A Love Like Ours” as among their most personal:

“When love like ours arrives / We guard it with our lives / Whatever goes astray / When a rainy day comes around / A love like ours will keep us safe and sound.”