VOL. I, NO. 1 • FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026 • PRICE: ONE QUARTER (DESIGN SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
THE REVIEW
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present is arguing about it on the internet.”
Everybody Wants to Own Your History
Six fights over who gets to tell America’s story—and the plumbing that makes it possible
The United States turns 250 this year, and almost nobody has noticed. That, dear reader, is precisely the point.
While you were busy not caring about the Semiquincentennial—a word that, mercifully, no one is expected to pronounce correctly—a remarkable number of institutions have been quietly fighting over the machinery that produces, stores, and distributes what Americans know about their own past. New coins were minted. Old signs were pried off walls with crowbars. The nation’s oldest historical society vetoed its own members. A federal agency had its grants killed by an organization named after a dog. A bankrupt company sold 15 million people’s DNA. And YouTube admitted that a significant chunk of the “history” on its platform was made by robots.
None of these stories, taken alone, is the biggest news of the week. But taken together, they describe something that hasn’t been widely reported: a simultaneous contest over every major pipeline through which Americans encounter their past—from the coins in their pockets to the algorithms in their feeds to the nucleotides in their cells. The individual battles are political. The pattern is structural.
This edition of The Review covers six of these fights. Each story stands alone. But the connecting thread is this: it’s not the stories that are being contested. It’s the infrastructure that carries them.
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Whose Faces Go on America’s Birthday Money?
The Treasury secretary overruled a bipartisan advisory panel to swap civil rights icons for Founding Fathers on the nation’s 250th anniversary quarters. Then someone proposed putting a living president on a dollar coin.
America’s new quarters started showing up in cash registers on Jan. 5, and you can tell a lot about the country’s mood by what’s on them—and what isn’t.
The five 2026 Semiquincentennial quarter designs feature the Mayflower Compact, the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. They depict George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. They are, by any measure, safe choices. The interesting part is what they replaced.
During the Biden administration, the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC)—a bipartisan panel established by Congress in 2003—spent years consulting historians, political appointees from both parties, the National Park Service, and the Smithsonian. The committee settled on themes including abolition, suffrage, and civil rights. Proposed designs honored abolitionist Frederick Douglass, six-year-old school integration pioneer Ruby Bridges, and the women’s suffrage movement.
On Dec. 10, 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent overruled the committee’s recommendations entirely. The CCAC was not consulted on the replacement designs. No member of the committee attended the unveiling at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Donald Scarinci, the committee’s longest-serving member, called it “another sad day for America.”
“The American story didn’t stop at the Pilgrims and Founding Fathers.” — Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)
The White House characterized the original designs as too focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory.” The Mint has also posted candidate designs for an unprecedented $1 coin featuring President Donald Trump—a break from the longstanding American tradition, dating to George Washington himself, of keeping living presidents off circulating currency. Washington, as Douglas Mudd of the American Numismatic Association noted, expressly declined to put his own portrait on United States coins.
Meanwhile, the broader Semiquincentennial celebration has fractured into competing visions. The congressionally authorized America250 Commission now operates alongside a White House Freedom 250 Task Force. The latter has announced a Grand Prix IndyCar race on the National Mall and partnered with PragerU for “Freedom Trucks”—mobile museums touring the country. The Smithsonian launched “Our Shared Future: 250” as counter-programming.
The coin swap may seem trivial. But coins are among the few material-culture objects the federal government puts directly into every citizen’s hands. Whoever designs them writes a pocket-sized national narrative distributed 750 million times over.
Sources: NPR, Jan. 5, 2026; The Week, Jan. 6, 2026; CRS Report IF13165
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“New Coins Commemorating America’s 250th Anniversary” — Popular Science describes the designs without editorial framing, emphasizing their one-year-only collectibility. Source: popsci.com (Jan. 2, 2026)
CON
“The Mint’s 250th Anniversary Coins Face a Whitewashing Controversy” — The Week details the CCAC override and argues the administration is “risking infusing partisan politics into the Semiquincentennial.” Source: theweek.com (Jan. 6, 2026)
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428 Historians Voted Yes. Then 16 People Said No.
The American Historical Association’s council vetoed two resolutions for the second year running, invoking an 1889 congressional charter against a 79% supermajority.
Four hundred and twenty-eight historians voted yes. Eighty-eight voted no. Then 16 people overruled them.
At the American Historical Association’s 139th Annual Meeting in Chicago on Jan. 10, 2026, members at the business meeting approved two resolutions by consecutive four-to-one margins. The first condemned the destruction of educational infrastructure in Gaza. The second opposed attacks on academic freedom at American universities. The next day, the AHA’s 16-member elected Council vetoed both.
It was the second consecutive year the Council had blocked a supermajority resolution on the same subject. In January 2025, the Council vetoed a similar scholasticide resolution after it passed at the New York meeting. The 2026 vote was larger, the margins wider, and the veto identical.
The Council’s defense rested on a specific institutional claim: that the resolutions “go beyond a specific focus on history and thereby fall outside the scope of the AHA’s mission.” That mission, the Council argued, is defined by the AHA’s 1889 Congressional charter—making it the oldest congressionally chartered learned society in the United States.
“We refuse to be silenced, and we refuse to accept that our colleagues’ lives matter less than institutional comfort.” — Palestinian Historians Group, Jan. 15, 2026
Critics pointed to historical precedent. The AHA passed resolutions opposing the Iraq War in 2007, condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and addressing the Vietnam War in 1969—all without the Council invoking the charter as a barrier. Stacy Fahrenthold, writing in Inside Higher Ed, argued that the charter had been “weaponized” to avoid political risk.
The governance question beneath the political one is genuine: What is a professional association for? The AHA’s 11,000 members include historians across every specialization. Only about 360 attended the business meeting where the vote took place. The Council’s position—that it cannot allow 360 attendees to commit an 11,000-member organization to a binding political position—has structural logic. But so does the counterpoint: if the Council can override any supermajority, the business meeting is ceremonial.
Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD), which organized the resolutions, has fielded insurgent candidates who won 2025 nominating committee elections. The next AHA Council election may be the real resolution.
Sources: AHA Council Letter, Jan. 17, 2026; Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 5, 2026; Jadaliyya, Jan. 15, 2026
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“Historians Must Reclaim the American Historical Association” — Fahrenthold argues the Council’s veto reveals an “epistemological double-standard” and that reform is one election cycle away. Source: insidehighered.com (Feb. 5, 2026)
CON
“AJC, AEN Urge AHA to Reject Biased Anti-Israel Resolution” — The American Jewish Committee and Academic Engagement Network argue the resolution undermines causal inference and urge the AHA to recommit to “intellectual inclusivity.” Source: ajc.org (Jan. 16, 2025)
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A 60-Year-Old Agency Lost 80% of Its Staff. Two Judges Called Foul.
DOGE terminated over 1,400 NEH grants. Courts ordered the money held. The Senate voted to restore funding. The president hasn’t signed it.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has been funding local history programs, scholarly research, and public libraries since 1965. Last April, the Department of Government Efficiency decided it should mostly stop.
In April 2025, DOGE terminated more than 1,400 previously awarded NEH grants totaling roughly $427 million, placed approximately 80% of the agency’s staff—about 145 people—on administrative leave, and cut support to all 56 state and territorial humanities councils. The terminations came without notice. Grant recipients, including scholars mid-project, learned their funding was gone by email.
The legal response was swift. In May, Oregon Humanities and the Federation of State Humanities Councils sued, alleging an “attempted destruction, spearheaded by DOGE, of the congressionally established federal-state partnership.” Separately, the Authors Guild and several individual scholars filed a class action in the Southern District of New York, arguing that grants had been canceled because their projects didn’t align with the administration’s ideology.
“The United States Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress, not the President.” — Judge Michael H. Simon, U.S. District Court, Oregon
By August, two federal judges agreed with the plaintiffs. The grants were ordered escrowed pending trial. But as Phoebe Stein, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, noted, the ruling was “excellent” but councils were “still operating without their” full funding. The state councils, which work with over 120 local partners annually and generate 1 of federal support, have been scrambling. Colorado Humanities reaches 300,000 people at a cost of 21 cents per person. Maryland Humanities’ CEO, Lindsey Baker, called the cuts “a dismantling of the cultural infrastructure that binds our state together.”
In January, the Senate passed a 2026 appropriations bill with level funding for NEH at 65 million of which goes to the state councils. The bill now goes to the president. The litigation is ongoing and in discovery.
Sources: NPR, Aug. 7, 2025; Federation of State Humanities Councils; Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“Defunding Our Future” — PA Humanities argues the cumulative effect reflects a “broader, deeply troubling pattern of disinvestment” in the institutions that sustain democratic culture. Source: pahumanities.org (May 2025)
CON
The administration’s proposed 2026 budget calls for the elimination of both the NEH and NEA, arguing private philanthropy should fund cultural programming. The Mellon Foundation’s $15M emergency grant to humanities councils may, ironically, support that theory. Source: FY2026 Presidential Budget Proposal
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They Asked Visitors Which Signs to Remove. Nobody Named One.
The government posted QR codes at national parks asking for complaints about “negative” content. Of nearly 200 responses, not one agreed. Then librarians started photographing everything.
In Philadelphia last September, workers arrived at the President’s House historical site—where George Washington once kept enslaved people during his presidency—and used crowbars to remove interpretive panels. The panels listed the names of nine enslaved members of Washington’s household.
The removals were carried out under Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” signed by President Trump in March 2025. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum subsequently directed all agencies to review signs and exhibits for content that was “negative about either past or living Americans” or that failed to “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes.”
By January 2026, the Washington Post reported removal orders at 17 National Park Service sites across six states, including Glacier National Park (climate change references), Little Bighorn Battlefield (descriptions of broken promises to Native Americans and violence at boarding schools), and the Grand Canyon (displacement of Native peoples). The Sierra Club has sued for records.
Here is where the story turns peculiar. Burgum’s order also required parks to post signs with QR codes soliciting public feedback on “negative” content. Government Executive obtained the first batch of nearly 200 submissions.
Not a single visitor submission identified a sign they wanted removed. Instead, they “implored the Trump administration not to erase the nation’s history.” — Government Executive, June 2025
A parallel preservation movement has emerged. In July 2025, librarians at the University of Minnesota launched the Save Our Signs (SOS) project, asking citizen volunteers to photograph NPS interpretive materials before they could be removed. By October, the project had collected more than 10,000 photographs. Smithsonian volunteers separately assembled 31,500 preservation photos in six weeks. On Jan. 23, 2026, the city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit to halt further removals at Independence National Historical Park.
The Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council voted 11–0 to oppose changes at Little Bighorn. The National Parks Conservation Association called the campaign “a tremendous insult to the national parks we know and love.”
Sources: NPCA; Outside Online, Jan. 2026; Government Executive, June 2025; Daily Montanan, Jan. 29, 2026
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“See the National Park Visitor Responses After Trump Requested Help Deleting ‘Negative’ Signage” — Government Executive publishes the actual visitor feedback forms, which unanimously oppose the removals. Source: govexec.com (June 2025)
CON
The executive order’s stated purpose is to ensure parks “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance” of American landscapes and history. The Heritage Foundation’s guide to historic sites grades parks on their “accuracy,” offering a conservative framework for interpretation. Source: heritage.org (ongoing)
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278 Channels, Zero Humans, 63 Billion Views
YouTube’s CEO called AI-generated history content a 2026 priority. Researchers found entire channels running on autopilot, earning $117 million a year.
If you’ve ever fallen asleep to a YouTube video titled “The Entire History of the American Frontier” narrated by a soothing voice over public-domain paintings, you may have been educated by a machine.
In September 2025, 404 Media published an investigation documenting a growing ecosystem of AI-generated “boring history” channels on YouTube—hours-long videos narrated by synthetic voices over static images, produced at near-zero cost and served to millions by the platform’s recommendation algorithm. Titles included “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One channel had been livestreaming 24/7 for weeks.
The phenomenon has a name now. “Slop”—defined by scholars Cody Kommers et al. in a January 2026 academic paper as content exhibiting “superficial competence, asymmetric effort, and mass producibility”—was named 2025 Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.
On Jan. 21, 2026, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan wrote in his annual letter that “managing AI slop” was a platform priority for 2026. Days later, YouTube removed 16 of the top 100 most-subscribed slop channels—35 million subscribers, 4.7 billion lifetime views, and estimated earnings of nearly $10 million.
“YouTube isn’t anti-AI, they’re anti-AI slop. The real target is repetitive, low-effort content clearly made to game the system rather than add value.” — Eric Shoemaker, quoted in Digiday
The broader numbers are staggering. Kapwing identified 278 channels running entirely on AI-generated content with a collective 63 billion views and 221 million subscribers, generating an estimated $117 million annually. Their study also found that 21–33% of content shown to new YouTube users was AI slop.
History content is structurally vulnerable to this kind of replacement. It relies on declarative narration, public-domain images, and an educational tone—all trivially synthesizable by current AI systems. Real history creators like Pete Kelly of History Time spend weeks or months researching, scripting, and editing. An AI content farm can produce a comparable-looking video in minutes.
Sources: CNBC, Jan. 21, 2026; Kapwing AI Slop Report, 2025; 404 Media, Sept. 3, 2025; Digiday, Feb. 2026
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“YouTube’s ‘AI Slop’ Crisis Is a Warning, and an Opportunity, for Local Media” — Argues the trust deficit created by slop validates the core value of human-vetted journalism. Source: tvnewscheck.com (Jan. 2026)
CON
YouTube’s own position, as stated by CEO Mohan, is that AI is “a tool and not a replacement” for creators. The platform is investing in AI creation features even as it cracks down on slop—a tension it has not resolved. Source: cnbc.com (Jan. 21, 2026)
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Your DNA Survived Bankruptcy. You Might Not Own It.
23andMe sold its genetic database to a nonprofit run by its own founder. Twenty-eight states sued. The class-action deadline is Tuesday.
When 15 million people spit into tubes and mailed them to 23andMe, they were buying a consumer product. When the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025, those genetic profiles became a structured financial asset—one of the most valuable things on the balance sheet.
The bankruptcy auction produced a strange result. Pharmaceutical giant Regeneron initially won with a 305 million. The bankruptcy judge approved the sale, noting that the transaction would result in “Ms. Wojcicki’s repurchase of a business that she co-founded and ran for years.”
Twenty-eight state attorneys general sued to block the transfer, arguing that selling genetic data without explicit customer consent violated privacy laws. The court-appointed Consumer Privacy Ombudsman expressed concerns, calling TTAM’s proposed three-person privacy advisory board potential “privacy theater.”
“This isn’t just data—it’s your DNA. It’s personal, permanent, and deeply private.” — Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield
The judge approved the sale anyway, concluding that TTAM—being the same business, employees, and leadership as 23andMe—didn’t technically constitute a “third party” requiring separate consent. About 1.9 million customers deleted their data during the proceedings. The other 13 million did not.
A detail that has received less attention: the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), the main federal law protecting genetic privacy, covers health insurance but explicitly excludes life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term care insurance—the products most relevant to 23andMe’s aging user base. As a Science article published in September 2025 warned, “the next data sale is likely to involve a buyer unrelated to the seller, which may result in fewer privacy protections.”
The class-action settlement for the 2023 data breach affecting 6.9 million users has a claims deadline of Feb. 17, 2026—next Tuesday. Eligible claimants can file at 23andmedatasettlement.com.
Sources: CNBC, Feb. 5, 2026; Lawfare, July 2025; Science, Sept. 2025; Public Citizen, Nov. 2025
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“Privacy, Consent, and National Security After the 23andMe Bankruptcy” — Lawfare argues that policymakers should prohibit the commodification and sale of DNA data during bankruptcy proceedings. Source: lawfaremedia.org (July 2025)
CON
Privacy expert Fred Cate testified that the TTAM transaction was “the perfect transaction” from a privacy perspective since “no one new will have access to the data.” The bankruptcy court agreed. Source: stltoday.com (March 2025)
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EDITORIAL
The Plumbing Matters More Than the Water
We have spent this edition on six stories that, on their surface, have nothing in common. A numismatic squabble. An academic governance crisis. A funding fight. A sign-removal campaign. A platform pollution problem. A bankruptcy proceeding.
The connecting thread is not political—or rather, not only political. It is structural. Each of these stories involves a contest over the machinery that produces, stores, or distributes what Americans know about their past. The coins are material-culture pipelines. The AHA is a credentialing mechanism. The NEH is an economic substrate. The NPS signs are physical presentation layers. YouTube is a distribution algorithm. 23andMe’s database is a biological archive.
What makes the current moment unusual is that all of these systems are being contested simultaneously. That has happened before—the late 1960s saw parallel fights over textbooks, museum exhibits, national narratives, and academic hiring. But it has never happened when the distribution channels were this numerous, this fast, and this cheap to flood with synthetic content.
In plumbing, the decisions that matter most are the ones made before the walls go up. The pipes you can’t see determine where the water flows.
The most underreported dimension of this story is the one about apathy. The 250th anniversary of American independence is, by most measures, the biggest civic commemoration of our lifetimes. Public interest is low. That should concern everyone, regardless of political orientation, because it means the architectural decisions—what goes on the coins, what stays on the signs, who gets funded, what the algorithm serves—are being made during the phase when the fewest people are watching.
We take no position on which version of the American story belongs on a quarter, a park sign, or a YouTube feed. We do take the position that the infrastructure question—who controls the pipeline—deserves at least as much attention as the content question. The stories we tell about ourselves matter. The systems that carry those stories matter more, because they’ll still be running long after the current arguments are settled.
The people building the plumbing right now know this. The rest of us should probably start paying attention.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO
“The Inherent Politics of History” — Academe Blog argues that history “is always political” and that institutional neutrality is itself a political act. Source: academeblog.org (Feb. 10, 2026)
CON
“AHA Leadership Vetoes Anti-Israel Resolutions” — Legal Insurrection argues the Council correctly protected the AHA’s institutional mission from activist capture. Source: legalinsurrection.com (Jan. 15, 2026)
Production Note: This edition of The Review was produced through a collaboration between a human editor and Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. All factual claims are sourced to named publications and institutional documents. Claims sourced to a single outlet are noted as such. The web searches underlying the “Perspectives” sections were conducted on Feb. 10, 2026. Readers are encouraged to follow source links and verify independently. Your skepticism remains appropriate and encouraged.
Coming Next: The long-form magazine version—a single essay weaving these six threads into one argument about infrastructure, narrative, and the architecture phase of America’s 250th year.
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© 2026 The Review. All rights reserved.
Editor: Daniel Markham
Published Feb. 13, 2026.