A new Morning Consult poll finds 53% of Americans don’t know why the American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence to separate from Britain on July 4, 1776.

New York Times: “During his first term, Mr. Trump told Kristi Noem — then a U.S. representative from South Dakota, now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security — that his “dream” was to be on Mount Rushmore. She later gave Mr. Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his face on it.”

“The idea has resurfaced since Mr. Trump returned to office. A congresswoman from Florida sponsored a bill in January to ‘direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.’ It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, which has yet to act on it.”

“If you look at the end of the Civil War — the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. If you take the end day — was it 1869? Or whatever.”

— President Trump, speaking to reporters.

“I wonder if—you know, the Civil War, it always seemed to me maybe that could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people.”

— President Trump, speaking to reporters.

“The last time the United States held a national military parade was in June 1991, timed to welcome returning veterans of the 100-day Persian Gulf War,” NPR reports.

ABC News: Democrats slam military parade as Trump’s multimillion-dollar “birthday party.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new probe into the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, vowing accountability for what he called the Biden administration’s “disastrous and embarrassing” handling of the events that led to the deaths of 13 US troops, Bloomberg reports.

“For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected, from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity,” the AP reports.

“Now, the Trump administration is scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable.”

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R) “is facing backlash for sharing a debunked conservative argument that the Three-Fifths Compromise was a step toward ending slavery in response to a discussion surrounding a bill that would eliminate state diversity programs,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

Said Beckwith: “The Three-Fifths Compromise, and many other things like that, were designed to make sure that justice was equal for all people and equality really meant equality for all.”

Fifty years after it ended, a new Emerson College poll finds a plurality of Americans — 44% — think the war in Vietnam was not justified, while 29% think the war was justified.

This is the lowest perceived justification of a war by the U.S. public from World War II to the Iraq War.

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.”

— Former Vice President Al Gore, quoted by Politico.

“We live in a moment when our freedoms are once again under attack from the highest office in the land. We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty.”

— Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D), quoted by the Boston Globe.

“President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday released more than 10,000 pages of files related to the 1968 assassination of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, following through on an executive order aimed at declassifying documents over the killings of high-profile Americans,” Bloomberg reports.

Michelle Berenfeld: “In about 80 years, roughly the same length of time between the end of World War II and now, the Roman Republic was transformed into a dictatorship. If you had told a Roman senator at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. that his grandchildren would willingly hand over governance to a monarch, he would not have believed you. Like the American one, the Roman Republic was founded on the rejection of a king. Rome had a representative government that, though flawed, was based on the rule of law, with freedom of speech and rights to legal recourse for its citizens.”

“The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years, about twice as long as Americans have had theirs. As was surely true for the Romans, most Americans can hardly imagine that their system of self-government might break and be replaced by an imperial dynasty. That is why considering what undid the Roman Republic is useful today—if we can learn from the Romans’ mistakes.”