Historians: No, to Removing Jefferson, Washington Monuments. Yes, to Contextualizing Them.

On Twitter, it was a four-alarm fire: In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, a committee reporting to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) called Tuesday to “remove, relocate or contextualize” the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument.

In the city of Washington. In the District of Columbia.

Some declared Bowser an anti-American Marxist who was trying to erase history; others complained that the report should count as an illegal contribution to President Trump’s reelection campaign. After a torrent of criticism, including from the White House, the Bowser administration removed the federal sites from the report’s recommendations Tuesday night.

But what about actual historians? Are those who have devoted their lives to the study of our slave-owning founders and their monuments similarly outraged?

In a word, no. Thanks largely to that third word: “Contextualize.”

“Contextualizing these monuments makes perfect sense,” said historian and Thomas Jefferson biographer Annette Gordon-Reed, in an email. “Removal, particularly of the Washington [Monument] and Jefferson Memorials, does not make sense given the formative role they both played in the founding of the United States.”