There is no better place to hear what America’s historians and history teachers think about the American Founding than in Philadelphia’s historic Old City. While recently on a guided walking tour through the neighborhood, my guide—a prominent scholar of 18th-century Philadelphia—was so overcome with emotion at a particular site that he breezed past a more notable landmark.

The first stop was the Old London Coffee House on the corner of Market and Front Streets, a hub for colonial life since its establishment in 1754. Philadelphians would meet there to discuss politics, hear the news of the day, and conduct business. One such historical detail about the coffee house captured the emotions of my guide: slave auctions used to be held in front of the building.

As he was choking back tears, he led my group right past another landmark just a few doors up the street. A plaque on the building noted the site of John Dunlap’s print shop. The Irish-born Dunlap emigrated to the colonies in the 1750s to apprentice at his uncle’s Philadelphia print shop. His uncle left the business in his care in 1766, and Dunlap eventually bought it outright. He went on to serve in the Continental Army during the War for Independence and saw action at Princeton and Trenton.

Prior to those battles, Dunlap received a printing contract with the Continental Congress, which regularly dispatched printers to produce broadsides, a common way to disseminate information in the Revolutionary era. So the fact that Congress requested Dunlap to print one would ordinarily be routine. Yet on that night, Dunlap worked alongside Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, painstakingly proofreading a missive for publication.

This evening was July 4, 1776. Dunlap went to his shop to print the Declaration of Independence.

He printed around 200 copies to be distributed throughout the colonies, including one sent to George Washington, who read it aloud to his troops defending New York City against the British. Yet the site of this print shop—where the most treasured document in American history was reproduced—did not merit so much as a mention by this “elite historian.” Nor did the fact that the Declaration’s rhetoric and principles would ultimately bring about the abolition of slavery, a detail apparently deemed insignificant by the prevailing historical orthodoxy.

Near the start of the tour, my guide told an anecdote to establish his credentials. He boasted about angering the right people over the original President’s House site in Philadelphia, which lies across the street from Independence Hall and next to the Liberty Bell Center. The reference was to President Donald Trump’s order to remove 25 panels and plaques from the site that focused exclusively on slavery. Countering the administration’s claim that discarding such inflammatory signage was reasonable, the historian shouted, “We do not cover up history!” But this frames a false choice about how historical sites should be presented.

As Jeffrey Anderson and John Fonte have both argued, the signs offer a one-sided portrait of Washington, who received far harsher criticism than even George III. They have nothing to say about the achievements of George Washington’s presidency and focus almost exclusively on his failures, real or perceived.

The question of what to display at the President’s House is not binary. Does anyone need over 20 signs to know that George Washington owned slaves? Is that fact not already present in virtually every presentation of the Founding Fathers—in Philadelphia, in literature, in the media? Would removing the panels erase the knowledge of Washington’s slaveholding? No. The issue is not the suppression of facts but the placement of emphasis.

In the case of the founding, historians and academics on the Left overemphasize slavery, race, and gender to create an impression that the founders were moral monsters. The principles of the founding receive little to no attention—liberty, equality, and self-governance and the considerable efforts to end slavery, whether begun by the founders or inspired by them.

In reality, Washington worked feverishly to set his finances in order so that his slaves would be legally emancipated upon his death. Thomas Jefferson signed the legislation to ban the international slave trade on the very first day the Constitution permitted. Several founders led the abolition of slavery in their states, as John Jay did in New York. By withholding such key facts and portraying only the negative aspects, museums and other historical institutions amplify one-sided narratives that advance their agenda of discrediting the founding and the country it formed.

As the nation’s 250th anniversary approaches, the way our heritage is presented to the public demands revision. The gatekeepers of our historical memory too often distort the past by overemphasizing the failures of our great American patriots while minimizing their achievements. It is little wonder the country is experiencing a significant decline in patriotism even in this watershed year.

Americans must demand a restoration of context and historical depth in our museums, monuments, and landmarks. Rather than overemphasizing slavery, historical institutions must convey to the American public the nuanced reality: it was the words from Dunlap’s press that would ultimately break the chains of the slaves who used to be traded on the street outside the Old London Coffee House.