Out MS NOW host Rachel Maddow brought happy news for fans of history that came out of a President’s Day judicial ruling, where the Trump administration lost its battle to hide the fact that George Washington was a slaveholder while he served as president.

At issue is the President’s House in Philadelphia, where the first two presidents – Washington and John Adams – worked during at least part of their terms as president. Washington, who was a slaveholder, had at least nine enslaved people working for him when he lived in that house, something that used to be part of the exhibit at the house, which is now managed by the National Park Service.

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But the Trump administration ordered that fact removed from the exhibit last month. Their reasoning was that national monuments should not have language that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living, and noting that Washington was a slaveholder is apparently considered disparaging even though it’s true.

The city of Philadelphia sued the administration, and yesterday, it won an injunction blocking a change in the exhibition at the President’s House as the case works its way through the legal system.

Maddow explained that the house was accidentally torn down in the 1950s before historians figured out that it was the residence of two presidents, and the National Park Service took over management of the building.

“You can see the foundations of the original building,” she said. “They’ve got artifacts there from the time that George Washington and John Adams lived in that house.”

Then Maddow explained that a George W. Bush-appointed judge ruled in favor of the city, after calling the administration’s argument that it can control whatever language is displayed in historical exhibitions “horrifying” and “dangerous.”

“Well, today, a big change in that case,” Maddow said. “Today, Happy Presidents’ Day. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ordered that the Trump administration must put those references to slaves and slavery back up.”

“The judge in the case is a Republican appointee from the George W. Bush administration, and she starts her remarkable ruling today with a quote from 1984 from George Orwell,” said Maddow. “She then says, quote, ‘As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘ignorance is strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historic truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.'”

Calling the ruling a “Presidents’ Day present,” Maddow quoted more from it: “The President’s House represents the City, ‘fulfilling an obligation to tell the truth – the whole, complicated truth.’ Removal of the crucial interpretive materials strips the site of that truth and deprives the public of educational opportunities designed to be free and accessible. That abrupt elimination of ‘historically significant educational material’ is like ‘pulling pages out of a history book with a razor.'”

“Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history…. Worst yet, the potential of having the exhibits replaced by an alternative script – a plausible assumption at this time – would be an even more permanent rejection of the site’s historical integrity, and irreparable.”

“Happy Presidents’ Day, Philadelphia,” Maddow concluded. “You are getting your history put back up by court order at the President’s House.”

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