Slouching Towards Arlington House

Abstract: This essay discusses the author's visit to Arlington House in the spring of 2025, a season of deepening crisis for federally funded research and public history on slavery and Black life in the United States. Arlington House (a National Park Service site also known as the Robert E. Lee Memorial) was closed for renovation in 2018 and reopened in 2021 with a new interpretive focus on slavery and freedom. Two years later, descendant groups signed an agreement with the Park Service to ensure that exhibits at the house were honest and accountable to the families of enslaved people who once lived and labored there, like Charles and Maria Syphax. These changes could still be seen at the site in March 2025. By the summer, however, the site's new features were threatened by political directives from Washington, DC, that targeted Black history. These developments make it more imperative than ever for historians to research the many complex lives that intersected at Arlington House, including twentieth-century Park Service employees like Essie Hart Lawrence, a Black park technician who worked at the site in 1975 when President Gerald Ford arrived to sign a resolution restoring Lee's citizenship.