With the United States celebrating in 2026 the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are reflecting on how historical highs — and lows — shaped the country into the nation it is today. The occasion comes at a time when national parks and historic sites are “at risk” and “government officials are removing, often without explanation, exhibits that enable us to see through the eyes of people who lived in a world different from our own,” said Carol Quillen at Time. Instead of shying from uncomfortable parts of the country’s past, take steps to better understand what happened by visiting places connected to movements and events like the abolition of slavery, the fights for civil and women’s rights and the forced displacement of Indigenous tribes and Japanese Americans.
Manzanar National Historic Site, Inyo County, CaliforniaManzanar War Relocation Center was where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II (Image credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal from the West Coast of those deemed a threat to national security. This resulted in the U.S. government incarcerating more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in 10 camps, which operated until the end of World War II.
The most well-known camp, California’s Manzanar War Relocation Center, held more than 10,000 people, all of them “crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights and patrolled by military police,” said The Guardian.Manzanar is now a national historic site, where visitors can watch the short film “Remembering Manzanar,” explore a museum filled with historic images and artifacts and step inside Block 14. There are two barracks buildings, a mess hall and a women’s latrine, providing insight into what it was like to live here during incarceration. Further out, a cemetery monument stands in honor of the 150 people who died at the camp during their imprisonment.Where to learn more: Manzanar isn’t the only War Relocation Center open to the public.
You can also visit Tule Lake in California and Minidoka in Idaho, with plans underway to turn Amache in Colorado into a national historic site. Objects donated by people incarcerated at Amache are on display at the Amache Museum in Granada, including suitcases, tea crates and clothing. National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, MemphisDr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968 (Image credit: Nina Westervelt / Bloomberg / Getty Images)In their quest for equal rights for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation, civil rights leaders and members of the movement tried many different tactics: protests, sit-ins, boycotts, marches and freedom rides. At the National Civil Rights Museum, all these efforts are given the attention and respect they deserve, with visitors able to learn more about “some of the most important wins for freedom and equality in the U.S.” while “connecting them to current happenings,” said Time Out.
Exhibitions guide visitors through “enslaved peoples’ fight for freedom, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and resistance efforts in the 1960s,” with visitors able to listen to interact with media, listen to oral histories and watch films.The museum is at the site of the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. During segregation, this was one of the properties where Black travelers could spend the night, and King often stayed at the motel when in Memphis.Where to learn more: The U.S.
Civil Rights Trail connects important landmarks in 15 states, including Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, integrated by the Little Rock Nine in 1957; the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four Black girls were killed in a 1963 bombing; and the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora, Mississippi, a museum with exhibitions on the young Black teenager’s life and his lynching by a white mob.Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, various statesFort Smith was the final federal outpost before entering Indian Territory (Image credit: mcpuckette / Getty Images)Between 1830 and 1850, the U.S. government forcibly removed members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their land in the southeast to a new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The removal came after the Indian Removal Act was passed and signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, as gold was discovered on Cherokee land and white settlers jockeyed for more acreage.
About 100,000 women, men, children and enslaved people made the brutal trek, with an estimated 15,000 dying of disease and starvation along the way or shortly after resettlement. The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail passes through Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,