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White-tailed deer have expanded their range in North America over many decades. Since the early-2000s, these deer have moved north into the boreal forests of western Canada. These forests are full of spruce and pine trees, sandy soil and freezing winters with lots of snow. They’re basically your typical winter wonderland in theory — but actually living there can be harsh.

Ecologists haven’t known whether a warmer climate in these forests is drawing deer north, or whether human land development might play a bigger role.

“Human land use and climate change are both leading causes of biodiversity loss. But more often than not, those two things are highly intertwined, and it’s really tricky to tell which one is the root cause — or if it’s both,” Melanie Dickie, a wildlife biologist at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan says. “We really need to know which one it is so we can have a better idea of what to do about it.

Dickie described these deer as an “invasive species.” Because more deer in these forests can have an impact on other species like boreal caribou. With deer come more predators like wolves. While deer are able to cope with living alongside predators like wolves, caribou are not. Dickie says they’ve evolved to mostly just avoid areas with lots of predators. And that gets tricky when there are more wolves around.

She also says that deer are really just one piece of the puzzle for boreal caribou — but having more information about what exactly is driving deer expansion helps her and other researchers figure out where to start when it comes to restoring land and protecting wildlife.

Read the study in Global Change Biology

Curious about more wildlife news? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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Today’s episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Emily Kwong, Regina G. Barber and Rachel Carlson checked the facts. Patrick Murray and Stu Rushfield were the audio engineers.

There’s a lonely old church in the mountains of West Virginia that holds a hidden history. Black coal miners in a segregated camp worshipped there starting in the 1920s. Now, the New Salem Baptist Church is listed as one of America’s 11 most endangered historic sites.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released a list highlighting such places every year since 1988. Carol Quillen is the organization’s new president and CEO. Trained as a historian, she was the first female president of Davidson College in North Carolina.

“I studied the past largely through texts, not places,” Quillen told NPR. “And the difference between imagining one’s relationship to the past through experiencing a place and reading a book in a library is really profound. So I love the way these places, which themselves hold layers and layers of stories, and invite us in the present to connect our stories to the ones these places hold.”

Quillen said the push to preserve the New Salem Baptist Church came from a white Catholic woman whose father was the town’s milkman. She enlisted not just the descendants of the church’s original parishioners but also local ATV riders who could see and admire the church from a mountain trail.

“I love stories like that where a preservation project can mobilize folks who normally wouldn’t encounter one another to work together on something significant to all of them,” Quillen said. “And in that work, transform what the place can mean.”

Black residents of Eatonville, Fla., have been trying to preserve their hometown for decades. One of the first self-governing all-Black towns in the United States, Eatonville was immortalized in the classic 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The legendary Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist once described her hometown as “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse.”

In a 2015 NPR story reported by Renata Sago, residents dreamed of an Eatonville reborn as a year-round heritage destination and remembered it as a refuge during the days of Jim Crow.

“We didn’t lock our doors and kids could go out and play,” recalled an elderly resident, Maye Saint Julian. “And everybody knew everybody. And all of these people that we honor so — James Brown, B.B. King, Lionel Hampton — these people came to Eatonville on a regular basis.”

Ideally, Eatonville and many other sites on the list, such as the Cindy Walker House, could eventually become better-known cultural destinations. Located in Mexia, Texas, the ramshackle white frame structure was where a remarkable, unsung figure in country music lived for many years. Walker was one of the few female songwriters of her era. She wrote country standards and number one hits for Roy Orbison, Merle Haggard, Elvis Presley and more.

After she died in 2006, Walker’s house was left abandoned. A handful of fans and heirs formed a foundation in her honor and purchased it in 2022.

“They found all kinds of things there,” Quillen said. “They found her typewriter. They found her country music awards. They found songs that no one had ever heard before.” One of those songs was a lost demo, called “Tennessee Rain,” that can be heard in the audio version of this story.

Over the past three decades, the National Trust has seen some triumphs with its annual list of endangered places. Dozens of them have been saved, including the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, which narrowly missed becoming the site of a shopping mall, and Little Rock Central High School, where young Arkansas students helped overturn a legacy of legal segregation in 1957.

Now established by Congress as a National Historic Site, it’s still a working public high school and a center for education about the country’s civil rights.

“We don’t want to spray these sites with ScotchgarEd, you know, and roll them off,” Quillen said. “We really want to reinvigorate them so that they’re active, exciting places for people to go so that they can continue to bring people together now and long into the future.”

Here are the rest of the endangered historic places on the list this year:

Estate Whim  Museum, Frederiksted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands: “Established during the colonization of St. Croix by Denmark, Estate Whim was a plantation producing cotton and sugar for export. The lives and legacies of those enslaved by plantation owners and those who continued to labor there for meager wages for a century after emancipation are inextricably tied to the site, which now hosts a museum, library and archives, and public programming. Repeated hurricanes have damaged many of Estate Whim Museum’s historic buildings and structures.”

Hudson-Athens Lighthouse, Athens, N.Y.: “Opened in 1874, the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse used to be one of several ‘middle-of-the-river’ lighthouses on the Hudson River. Now, it’s one of only two left standing. However, due to erosion and other preservation challenges, engineering reports indicate the building is at risk of collapse within three years if no action is taken.”

Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, Calif.: “Little Tokyo is one of only four remaining Japantowns in the United States and one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but its unique character is endangered by large-scale development and transit projects and displacement of legacy businesses and restaurants.”

Minute Man National Historical Park, Walden, and nearby landmarks, Massachusetts: “Minute Man National Historical Park and the nearby areas of Concord, Lexington, Lincoln, and Bedford are home to places of great significance in American history, including Walden Pond and Woods and the preserved homesteads of authors and environmentalists: Little Women’s Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. A proposed major expansion of nearby Hanscom Field airport could significantly increase private jet traffic, leading to increased noise, vehicular traffic, and negative environmental and climate impacts.”

Roosevelt High School, Gary, Ind.: “Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary was built in 1930 specifically to serve the educational needs of Black Americans and has graduated notable alumni including professional athletes, well-known actors, and members of The Jackson 5. The school has been unoccupied and deteriorating since 2019.”

Sitka Tlingit Clan Houses, Sitka, Alaska: “The Sitka Tlingit Clan Houses in southeast Alaska are critically important to both the history and the future of the Lingít (commonly spelled in English as “Tlingit”). For many years, the matrilineal clan structure of multigenerational extended families living together in clan houses was discouraged in favor of the Western practice of living with nuclear families. Today, only eight of the original 43 clan houses remain and even fewer still function as clan houses in the traditional way.”

Tangier American Legation, Tangier, Morocco: “In 1821, the Tangier American Legation in Morocco was gifted to the United States by the Moroccan Sultan as a token of friendship, becoming the first American public property located abroad, and subsequently served as a U.S. diplomatic mission for a record 140 years. Now a cultural center, museum, and research library, the Legation is in urgent need of structural stabilization and repairs following the recent collapse of an adjacent building.”

Wilderness Battlefield Area, Orange County, Va.: “The Battle of the Wilderness marked a pivotal turning point in the Civil War, but today, not all the historically significant landscape is protected. Proposed large new developments, including millions of square feet of industrial data centers and thousands of homes, may negatively impact important historic sites and landscapes and degrade the visitor experience.”

On Friday, Colorado became the latest state to detect the bird flu virus spreading in dairy cattle. It follows revelations earlier in the week that viral fragments are turning up in retail milk.

Still, scientists don’t view this as an immediate threat to human health.

Genetic material is not the same as infectious virus and pasteurization is expected to inactivate the virus in milk, but the findings speak to the broader uncertainty about the extent of the spread.

“There’s so many critical things that we still need to know to get a better perspective on how bad this is, or maybe it’s not so bad,” says Dr. Rick Bright, a virologist and the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Federal health agencies started sharing more details publicly this week, but Bright says there’s still not enough transparency.

“It’s the void that just leaves everyone nervous,” he says

Other scientists say the reality is that there are still many unresolved questions about this outbreak, given how novel it is.

“There’s a couple big unknowns at this point,” says Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Here’s what scientists who are tracking the virus still want to know:

How widespread is the virus in dairy cattle?

That’s still far from clear.

While the official tally shows it’s been detected in nine states and just over 30 herds, the actual number could be much larger.

First of all, there hasn’t been widespread testing in cattle.

The fact that viral material is now being found in retail milk suggests “this virus is probably spread around quite a bit,” says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee.

On Thursday, the FDA said that preliminary results from nationwide samples of retail milk indicate about one in five samples are positive for viral traces. A survey of retail milk in the Midwest found 58 out of 150 samples were positive, according to Andrew Bowman at the Ohio State University.

Webby discovered this himself when he went to the store to grab a carton of milk, which he intended to use as a negative control in his work on H5N1.

To his surprise, even that ended up being positive (unfazed, he kept the milk).

Currently the virus has only been detected in a tiny fraction of dairy herds in the U.S., but it’s hard to know the significance of that finding when you don’t also have details on the overall number of cattle tested, says Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Centers for Health Security.

“Those are kind of basic questions that would really help get us more ground truth quickly,” he says.

The USDA has just taken some new steps that could offer a better picture of the outbreak. There will be mandatory reporting of positive tests in cattle and a requirement that dairy cattle test negative for the virus before they move across state lines.

Potentially complicating the picture: Some unknown number of cattle could be shedding the virus without showing obvious symptoms. Federal health officials have confirmed this.

“We don’t know how many animals have this,” says Alexis Thompson, a veterinarian at Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory. “There has been very little sampling done. We don’t know how many [sick] animals we have. We don’t know how many asymptomatic animals we have. That testing has not been done.”

Because milk from sick cows is supposed to be discarded, this could help explain how remnants of the virus entered the milk supply.

If it turns out there are lots of animals shedding the virus and not symptomatic, the outbreak could be “substantially larger” than we realize, says Inglesby. “To get to the bottom of that, we would need to do surveillance testing in places that don’t already have clear outbreaks.”

Does the milk testing positive on retail shelves contain infectious virus?

So far, it doesn’t appear that way, but scientists who are studying this possibility acknowledge it’s too soon to say that with absolute certainty.

The PCR testing that has found evidence of viral fragments in the milk on grocery store shelves doesn’t actually tell you whether or not it’s “live” virus, meaning whether it’s capable of replicating.

This form of testing is extraordinarily sensitive and detects small pieces of genetic material, says Lee-Ann Jaykus, a food microbiologist at North Carolina State University.

“There’s evidence that that milk at one point in time may have had virus associated with it, but there is no evidence that that virus would be infectious, at least with the information we currently have,” she says.

Pasteurizing milk can knock out bacteria and viruses; however, it doesn’t erase every trace of those germs.

Federal health officials have stressed that avian influenza doesn’t stand up well to the high temperatures and past research on pasteurization indicates “it’s very likely to effectively inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1 in milk from cows.”

“We’ve seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” said Don Prater from the Food and Drug Administration.

Research on pasteurization in eggs, which happens at a lower temperature than milk, shows that the process inactivates the bird flu virus.

Jaykus and other scientists agree that finding viral material doesn’t necessarily suggest an immediate threat to human health.

“It’s really important to sort of not get out of control about fear of consuming milk,” says Jaykus.

There is an important caveat though: There has been no direct research on how pasteurizing cow milk affects bird flu virus. Those studies are taking place right now.

Early experiments on a small number of samples suggest there is no viable virus in these positive samples, said Jeanne Marrazzo, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Webby, who looked at samples of milk sent by Bowman, says they tried to grow the virus in cultured cells and embryonated chicken eggs — two places where flu loves to grow — and found that it did not reproduce.

“It’s pretty good evidence,” he says, “We could never say there’s none, but we could say if it’s there, it’s at a very, very, very low level.”

Jaykus says even if the milk did happen to have a small amount of infectious virus, “there just isn’t evidence that that is a transmission route for flu.”

Rick Bright, on the other hand, has more concerns about the milk.

“It’s a small inconvenience for me not to drink milk until we have more data,” he says, “It doesn’t mean that I think everyone should stop drinking milk. It’s a personal risk assessment.”

He says the key question is how much virus is in the milk, and whether that changes if more cows get sick and more virus enters the milk supply.

“The higher the viral load in the milk, the more difficult it is for pasteurization to work completely,” he says. “If they show at this point there’s no viable virus in the milk, that’s a point in time. And what’s going to be really critical is that the FDA continues to monitor this.”

How exactly is the virus spreading?

For weeks, the leading theory has been that the primary route of spread is through the milk. This is where high concentrations of the virus are being found.

This general idea was affirmed again this week by Mike Watson with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, who said the evidence still points to some form of “mechanical transmission.”

Virus could be spread on “milking equipment,” by “individuals moving from facility to facility,” and via rodents that come in contact with milk and then move around, he said.

Federal health officials and scientists believe the virus has moved with lactating cattle from one herd to another. But how it’s getting from one cow to another on a given farm “is a key missing piece of knowledge,” says Webby.

Genetic sequencing indicates that there was likely a single introduction from birds into cattle, which then resulted in further spread among cattle, says Moncla, who has been analyzing the genomic data.

“A lot of these cattle sequences are quite similar to each other, suggesting that there’s almost certainly some degree of cattle-to-cattle transmission going on,” she says.

Moncla says it’s hard to say exactly how long the virus has been spreading through dairy cattle, although some scientists have suggested it may have been circulating for many months, even earlier than February.

The USDA has also noted another concerning development — that there have been some instances of the virus moving from domesticated poultry to cattle.

“The degree of transmission, combined with the fact that we’re likely missing cases in cattle, leads to a bit of concern,” says Moncla.

What is the risk to humans as the virus keeps spreading?

First the reassuring news: Even with all these cows being infected, there has only been one documented human infection during the current outbreak in dairy cattle.

That person, a dairy worker in Texas, had conjunctivitis.

This week, federal health officials reiterated that the overall risk to the general public remains low, in part because “we have not observed changes to the virus’s genetic makeup that would suggest an enhanced ability to spread to humans or among humans,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director at the CDC.

So far, states have tested 23 people for avian flu and have monitored 44 people who were considered exposed and at risk for infection, he said.

Generally, cases of bird flu are rare in humans and it takes a big dose of virus — for example through direct contact while slaughtering poultry — to get infected. Since 2022, there have been 26 human cases of H5N1 virus infection reported worldwide.

Webby says it is possible that cows don’t put that much “pressure on the virus to change,” which could be one reason scientists haven’t seen alarming mutations in the samples collected.

“I don’t think the needle has moved at all” in terms of human risk, he says.

Of course, the perennial fear is that the virus could mutate while in cows, or an intermediary animal, and then find its way into humans.

Scientists have documented some mutations in bird flu when it has spread in other mammals. But previous research has shown there needs to be a host of changes — most of all, the virus would have to evolve a way to bind to receptors in the upper airway of humans — to become a pandemic threat.

When it comes to cattle, the CDC’s Sonja Olsen says they still aren’t sure if it’s the exposure to raw milk on the farms that’s the primary risk to humans. “We don’t know if it’s [surface] transmission. We don’t know if there’s aerosolization of the milk.”

Dr. Bright says the CDC should be conducting antibody studies on dairy workers to see if human cases have escaped detection, rather than waiting for cases to show up in the emergency room.

“I am going to keep my radar up,” he says. “If this were to get out of hand, we have to be prepared to respond really quickly. And I’m not quite sure we’re fully ready to respond if we needed to.”

WASHINGTON — In an effort to crack down on airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, the U.S. Department of Transportation has announced new regulations aimed at expanding consumer protections.

One of the final rules announced Wednesday requires airlines to show the full price of travel before passengers pay for their tickets. The other will force airlines to provide prompt cash refunds when flights are canceled or significantly changed.

“Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them – without having to ask,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement announcing the new rules.

Surprise junk fees have become a large and growing source of revenue for airlines in recent years, according to the DOT.

“Today’s announcements will require airlines to both provide passengers better information about costs before ticket purchase, and promptly provide cash refunds to passengers when they are owed — not only saving passengers time and money, but also preventing headaches,” Buttigieg said.

The airline industry is unlikely to welcome the new rules. At a hearing on the proposed fee rule in March 2023, an industry lobbying group representing American, Delta and United said it would be too difficult for airlines to disclose their charges more clearly.

“The amount of unwanted and unneeded information forced upon passengers” by the new policy would only cause “confusion and frustration,” warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America. “Very few, if any, need or want this information, and especially when they are initially trying to understand schedule and fare options.”

But the DOT insists its new rule will give consumers the information they need to better understand the true costs of air travel.

“I believe this is to the benefit of the sector as a whole,” Buttigieg said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, because passengers will have “more confidence in the aviation sector.”

The new rules require airlines to disclose all baggage, change, and cancellation fees, and to share that information with third-party booking sites and travel agents.

The regulation also prohibits bait-and-switch tactics, the DOT says, that disguise the true cost of flights by advertising a low base fare that does not include all mandatory fees.

“This is really about making sure that we create a better experience for passengers, and a stronger aviation sector in the United States,” Buttigieg said in the NPR interview.

Negotiators from about 175 countries have been sparring for more than a year over a treaty to clean up plastic pollution that’s choking rivers and piling up in landfills. As a critical new round of deliberations starts this week in Canada, the talks are floundering.

Some scientists and civil society groups say the United States bears a lot of the blame.

Almost every piece of plastic is made from fossil fuels, and major oil and natural gas producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia have also been widely criticized for throwing up roadblocks in the negotiations. However, scientists and environmentalists following the talks say the U.S. exerts outsized influence on the process. The country is the top producer of oil and gas globally, and it has the world’s biggest economy, which has historically given the U.S. huge sway in environmental negotiations.

So far, American negotiators have been unwilling to push for measures in the treaty that would drive big cuts in plastic waste, critics say, like caps on manufacturing. Instead, they say, U.S. government representatives have put their weight behind policies around recycling and waste management that are favored by the country’s giant fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Researchers say those actions on their own won’t drastically reduce plastic pollution.

“I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that where we’re headed at right now with progress in negotiations is towards failure. And if there’s one country that I think is responsible for that, I think it’s the United States,” says Douglas McCauley, a professor of environmental science at University of California, Santa Barbara, who has consulted with the U.S. State Department about the treaty and is attending the talks in Ottawa.

NPR spoke to seven scientists and environmental advocates who have consulted with the U.S. government about the plastics negotiations, some multiple times. Many of those experts contend that an absence of U.S. leadership is hindering efforts to push forward a treaty with effective regulations. The outcome of the negotiations could also have big implications for human health. A recent study found plastics contain more than 4,200 hazardous chemicals, the vast majority of which aren’t regulated globally, according to the researchers.

“It’s not that the U.S. is actively opposing some of these policies that could make a difference,” McCauley says. “It’s that they are showing no action whatsoever, no ambition whatsoever, for adopting any of these policies.”

In a letter to President Biden in March, a coalition of more than 300 scientists said policy recommendations the government received from plastic manufacturers — and the government’s own stance in the talks to date — are “inconsistent” with efforts to deal comprehensively with plastic waste. And a group of nine Democratic attorneys general whose states are grappling with plastic pollution recently urged the U.S. treaty delegation to back stronger global rules, saying the country is “uniquely positioned” to influence the negotiations.

“There is an important role the U.S. could play in addressing the growing influence of industry on these negotiations,” says Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law who is an observer at the negotiations and whose organization has consulted with the State Department about the treaty. “So far, we have yet to see the U.S. on the right side of that issue.”

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement to NPR that U.S. officials met with “a wide set of stakeholders” ahead of the negotiations in Canada, and that the country has a “central role in bridging differing positions” in the talks. For an agreement to be effective, it needs to be supported by every country, the spokesperson said, including major plastic producers and consumers.

Matt Seaholm, chief executive of a business group called the Plastics Industry Association, says the U.S. is doing “a very good job of trying to balance all of the interests” of different stakeholders.

“The U.S. government has positioned itself well to drive forward a workable, consensus-based agreement,” Ross Eisenberg, president of another industry group called America’s Plastic Makers, said in a statement.

It’s a pivotal moment in the negotiations

The world produces about 400 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme — roughly the weight of every human on the planet. Most of it ends up in places like oceans, shorelines and landfills, where it breaks down into tiny pieces called microplastics that have been found in every corner of the environment and inside human bodies.

The problem is getting worse. The amount of plastic waste the world produces is expected to almost triple in the coming decades, with less than a fifth recycled, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. So in 2022, countries agreed to negotiate a legally binding agreement to “end plastic pollution.”

With months to go before a deadline to hash out the treaty, interest groups on all sides of the issue say this is a pivotal moment. The last round of negotiations in Kenya ended in deadlock. Afterward, environmental groups warned the talks were at risk of collapsing after some oil- and gas-producing countries blocked a final decision on how to move forward.

The negotiations are happening at a time when the oil and gas industry increasingly sees petrochemicals as a core part of their business. Efforts to limit the risks from climate change threaten demand for fossil fuels, but oil and gas demand for petrochemicals is expected to keep rising for years, industry analysts say.

Magnus Løvold, a policy advisor at the Norwegian Academy of International Law, says fossil-fuel producers including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Bahrain “want this process to fail.”

An observer at the negotiations, Løvold adds: “The reason for that is that these countries, they have huge oil production, they have a considerable petrochemical industry, so they see that regulation of plastics is a threat to their economic interest.”

The U.S. is a giant in those same industries. Booming production of American natural gas has propelled plastic manufacturing around the world. Last year, the country produced, consumed and exported a record amount of ethane, which is used in plastic manufacturing and almost always comes from natural gas when it is produced in the U.S.

Experts who have met with the State Department and who have attended the talks say U.S. negotiators could be handcuffed by domestic politics. It would be “probably impossible” for the Biden administration to convince two-thirds of the Senate to approve a plastics treaty, says Løvold of the Norwegian Academy of International Law.

The U.S. government “does not want to be the bad guy,” says Erica Nuñez, head of The Ocean Foundation’s plastics initiative who has consulted with the State Department. “I think they do really want to come out of this with some wins. And I think they’re very challenged right now in identifying what those wins are [realistically] within the U.S. context.”

Against the backdrop of booming fossil fuel production, U.S. negotiators at the talks have declined to back a binding global agreement, say the state attorneys general and environmental advocates who have attended the talks. Instead, they say the U.S. has sought an accord that would leave countries free to decide for themselves how to clean up plastic pollution.

“The U.S. is really trying to reshape what could be a binding global treaty with binding global targets into a ground-up treaty where every country just says, ‘Alright, this is what we’re willing to do,'” says Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law. “And that is inadequate.”

A State Department spokesperson said the agreement needs to include “universal obligations,” but that “overly prescriptive approaches” could dissuade countries that are big producers and consumers of plastic from joining. Countries should be able to meet their obligations “in ways that take into account their respective priorities and circumstances,” the spokesperson said.

The plastic industry says cutting production is off limits

The plastics industry is fighting on two fronts to block treaty provisions that could constrain manufacturing. It is trying to stop countries from limiting how much new plastic is produced, and it opposes global regulations on the chemicals that companies use.

Scientists and environmental advocates say that to make a significant dent in plastic pollution, countries have to cut how much new plastic they manufacture. But plastic makers and the oil and gas industry, which includes national oil companies and publicly traded corporations, say the world needs all the plastic they can produce, and that negotiators should focus on creating a so-called circular economy where plastic is recycled and reused to prevent waste.

The industry is making that argument at the same time it tries to fend off scrutiny of a decades-long controversial campaign to sell recycling to the public. Investigations, including by NPR, have shown the plastics industry promoted recycling even though officials long knew that it probably wouldn’t work on a large scale. Former industry officials have said the goal was to avoid regulations and ensure demand for plastics kept growing.

Current officials have said those investigations don’t accurately portray today’s industry.

“We fully and readily admit that we don’t recycle enough plastic,” says Seaholm of the Plastics Industry Association. “But what we’re saying is we want to recycle more. The industry is putting billions of dollars into recycling technologies that get us where we need to be.”

Seaholm says the industry also supports policies to encourage recycling, like making producers help pay for recycling infrastructure, and requiring companies to use some recycled material in plastic products.

A lot of experts say recycling will have to be part of the solution, because plastic is ingrained in modern life. But they say governments need to regulate manufacturing for recycling to work. The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which includes major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever and Walmart, is calling for governments to phase out “problematic plastics” that are hard to recycle or that are likely to end up as waste in the environment.

A State Department spokesperson said the U.S. is advocating for measures to reduce demand for new plastic, including through government procurement policies. However, the spokesperson said countries wouldn’t be stopped from also trying to limit the supply of new plastic. A lot of countries want to do that with caps on manufacturing.

Reducing demand for new plastic is “great,” says Nuñez of The Ocean Foundation. But “we still need to directly implement policies to limit fossil fuel extraction — which is something that the U.S. is avoiding,” she says.

As for the chemicals that go into plastic, industry representatives say they should be regulated by national governments, not by a global treaty on plastic pollution.

But scientists and environmental advocates calling for global chemical regulations note that plastic waste – and the chemicals it’s made from – doesn’t stay in the country where it is produced. It floats down rivers and around oceans.

To protect people and the environment, governments that are part of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, including the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as a number of developing countries from Rwanda to the Maldives, want to “eliminate and restrict” hazardous plastics and chemicals globally. They also want to force companies to disclose information about the chemicals they use.

“We have the evidence to show that human health and environmental health are being impacted,” says Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University who was on a call recently with the State Department discussing the plastics treaty. “If we can’t get information on what’s being used,” she adds, “we have no way of truly making these products safer.”

Lawmakers and observers warn of industry influence

But groups advocating for aggressive global rules say there’s been little progress in the negotiations. After more than a year of talks, governments still haven’t come up with a plan that has the “ambition and strength” to limit plastic production and cut down on pollution, the group of state attorneys general wrote to the State Department earlier this month. The group faulted the U.S. delegation for taking a position that “lacks concrete objectives or standards.”

“The United States has the power to persuade and to be forward-leaning,” says Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium who has consulted with the State Department on the plastics treaty and is leading a delegation at the talks for the International Science Council. “Right now, you’ve seen other countries doing that. And so that’s been disappointing to many of us.”

Negotiators face intense lobbying from groups that have big financial stakes in the plastics industry. The influence of plastic producers and petrochemical companies is “one of the largest barriers to strong action,” a group of Democrat lawmakers, as well as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and Mohammed Chahim, a member of the European Parliament, wrote recently to Biden and leaders of the UN and European Commission.

Ahead of this week’s negotiations in Canada, the industry said it would be a mistake to talk much about manufacturing. “Certainly there are those in the [Biden] administration who would like to see some much more aggressive policies towards our industry, which we certainly don’t agree with,” says Seaholm of the Plastics Industry Association. “But there are those who are truly honest brokers that we’re continuing to work with.”

The sound of the party filters across the mansion’s lawn long before you see it: Dozens of guests spill out onto the front porch of the stately Fendall Hall in Eufaula, Alabama.

It’s an engagement party, and past the people drinking white wine in the main hall is one of the home’s historians, Susan Campbell.

She swings open the door to the expansive backyard.

“They had, like, 5 acres or so,” Campbell says of the former owners, the Young-Dent family. They built the house in the late 1850s.

But you might already know this, because planted in the front yard of this historical home is a large, black-and-gold, square metal historical marker with the seal of the Alabama Historical Commission — and it says so.

Edward Brown Young was a “banker, merchant and entrepreneur,” it says. He “organized the company which built the first bridge” in Eufaula, and his daughter married a Confederate captain in the “War Between the States.”

What the marker doesn’t mention, however, is that Young was a cotton broker, one of the most powerful men in the slave trade. Nor does it mention that he owned nine slaves, according to the federal 1860 census.

And while the sign claims the company he organized built the bridge, that bridge, spanning the Chattahoochee River, was actually designed, managed and built by a slave named Horace King, a renowned and gifted engineer, along with a large group of enslaved men.

Campbell says she’d like to see more of this information included.

“But that’s because I’m a Northerner, not a Southerner,” she says. She moved to the South 20 years ago from Michigan. She says most people she knows here wouldn’t agree with her.

“I mean, they know,” she says, glancing over at the revelers on the porch. “They know it. But [they] don’t necessarily want to be reminded.”

That’s the difficult thing about the truth. It’s just not as fun to throw parties in places where terrible things happened.

How the U.S. tells its own story is a debate raging in schools, statehouses and public squares nationwide. It has led to social movements and angry protests. But for more than a century, historical markers have largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.

With more than 180,000 of them scattered across the U.S., it’s easy to see why:

Even governments don’t really know what they all say. Many state officials told NPR that they have no idea what signs are in their state, what stories they tell or who owns them.

And while markers often look official, the reality is that anyone can put up a marker — more than 35,000 different groups, societies, organizations, towns, governments and individuals have. It costs a few thousand dollars to order one.

Over the past year, NPR analyzed a database crowdsourced by thousands of hobbyists, looking to uncover the patterns, errors and problems with the country’s markers. The effort revealed a fractured and often confused telling of the American story, where offensive lies live with impunity, history is distorted and errors are sometimes as funny as they are strange.

Three separate states, for example, have markers that claim to be the place where anesthesia was discovered. Two states, Kentucky and Missouri, both claim to be the home of Daniel Boone’s bones. Michigan and Alabama both claim to be the home of the first railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains, while Maryland and New Jersey both claim to have sent the first telegram.

Texas, on the other hand, claims to be the home of the first successful airplane flight — completed by a man who was neither of the Wright brothers.

Meanwhile, dead animals are rampant. Florida marks a dead alligator named Old Joe; California marks a dead horse — also named Old Joe. Arizona put up a marker for a donkey that drank beer. California thought it had a dead mastodon until a marker explained it was actually a dead circus elephant.

Somewhat dead humans are also popular. There are markers memorializing 14 ghosts, two witches, one vampire, a wizard and a couple who, a New Hampshire marker says, may have been abducted by aliens.

But the deeds of men are far more prevalent, even if questionable. Nevada marks a man who killed 11 people in the 1850s, even though it notes he had “few, if any redeeming traits.” Arizona, on the other hand, marks the grave of a man the local town wrongly hanged for stealing a horse in 1882. It says, “He was right. We was wrong. … Now he’s gone.”

There are markers to “world famous” items that few could likely pinpoint: soda water, cantaloupes, roofing slate, mustard, frozen custard, French-style cheese, beef jerky, a Santa Claus school, bourbon ball candy and dozens of others.

These are not to be outdone by the “world’s best” cheddar cheese, hobby garden or seed rice, or even the “world’s greatest” waterfall, harbor, gold mine, battleship, oil field, rodeo clown, roller coaster or chicken, among many others.

While some markers date back centuries, they proliferated in the 20th century, meant to capture the attention of traveling Americans who had hit the road for the first time in their new cars. The markers brought business and tourism to out-of-the-way towns. Today the roadsides and public squares of America are replete with markers that fulfill their most basic purpose, offering a simple, often sterile recounting of an interesting moment in place and time.

But over the past century, many markers have also become symbols of the country’s dark and complicated past, in some cases erected not to commemorate history but to manipulate how it is told, NPR found.

From the Atlantic through the Plains, more than 270 markers describe Native Americans as “savage,” “hostile” or “semi-civilized,” or they use racial slurs.

In the West and Southwest, markers herald the work of missionaries and praise rangers without mentioning the violence and cultural destruction they often inflicted.

Across the South, markers honor notable men and notable houses without mentioning the forced, free labor that made both the homes and the men’s wealth possible. NPR found that nearly 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery.

A fractured version of history

Particularly distorted is the Civil War, one of the single most marked topics nationwide. NPR’s analysis revealed more than 500 markers that describe the Confederacy in glowing terms, vilify the Union, falsify the reasons for the war or recast Confederate soldiers as the war’s true heroes.

At least 65 markers appear to promote a racist philosophy called the Lost Cause, which claims, among other things, that Black people enjoyed being enslaved.

Many of those Confederate markers weren’t written in error, NPR found. They were part of a plan.

One of them is in Tuskegee, Ala., a city that Council Member Johnny Ford describes as the “citadel of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Standing in the town square, he ticks off aspects of the city’s famous history: home of the Tuskegee Airmen, Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington’s National Business League. It was also the birthplace of Rosa Parks.

Close to 90% of its residents are Black, he points out.

But in the middle of the square is a stone marker depicting two Confederate flags that says: “Honor the brave. With God as our vindicator. Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy to the Confederate soldiers of Macon County.”

By Ford’s reading, that marker “reflects the fight to preserve slavery,” he says. “That is not a positive sign for us here in our community.”

Ford and other citizens of Tuskegee have tried for decades to remove the marker, which, like many Confederate stone markers, also has a Confederate soldier on top.

But they can’t. Because like thousands of markers nationwide, it was put up by a private group — in this case, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization made up almost entirely of white women.

“They said they built it in honor of the Confederate dead, which we respect,” Ford said. “Honor their dead, but not in a public place. Put it in some museum.”

But museum exhibits were not what the United Daughters of the Confederacy was after. While the group’s monument-building efforts are well known, NPR’s analysis found that the United Daughters also helped erect more than 600 historical markers, far surpassing the efforts of any other Civil War heritage group.

These markers congratulate men for fighting for “the cause,” “a sacred cause,” “their righteous cause” and “a lost cause” and for their “patriotic devotion,” “heroism unsurpassed” and “faultless valor” as they fought to break the country apart to keep men, women and children enslaved and preserve what the markers describe as their “glorious heritage.”

A “fairer flag was never furled,” declares one monument in Montgomery, Ala., not of the American flag, but the Confederate flag. In Sherman, Texas, a marker that the United Daughters of the Confederacy rededicated in 1996 claims Confederate soldiers’ actions will “teach future generations … Southern chivalry.”

The group put up at least three markers for and memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It put up a marker outside Concord, N.C., to the KKK itself, though that one has been removed.

Lately, Ford and the United Daughters have been battling in court. But Ford says it’s hard to know whom he’s fighting.

“There are no daughters that live here,” Ford said. “I think they’re mostly dead. They don’t pay any taxes here. Yet they want to dominate our square.”

Jay Hinton, a lawyer an hour away in Montgomery who represents the group in court, told NPR in an interview that the women just want to honor dead Confederate soldiers. He acknowledged that few, if any, United Daughters live in the area.

Tax records show that the group, based in Richmond, Va., has $11 million in assets, with an annual revenue of $1 million to $2 million.

Asked why the United Daughters want to keep a marker in a place they don’t live, in a town that doesn’t want it, for soldiers who died 160 years ago, Hinton said it’s the women’s choice to make. While the 1906 town deed filed in the courthouse across the street gave the land for the marker to the United Daughters to keep as a “park for white people,” Hinton says the group has always let everyone use the park.

“We’re pretty comfortable, and it makes us feel like good citizens to say that we didn’t discriminate, and therefore we shouldn’t be made to [remove the marker],” he said. “We think we get to keep the dirt because we’ve been doing what we ought to be doing from a constitutional perspective.”

Nationwide, markers from Civil War heritage groups like the United Daughters outnumber comparable Union groups’ markers by more than 2-to-1, NPR found. Confederate hospitals and Confederate cemeteries follow a similar pattern.

In all, markers about Confederates or the Confederacy are prolific, with more than 12,000 mentions. But the words “slave” and “slavery” show up only about half as many times.

When they do, many tell a racist myth about “faithful” slaves or otherwise diminish the reality of slavery. Others markers use racist language or support white supremacy.

As groups like the United Daughters disappeared from Tuskegee and other areas, historical markers gave those organizations and their message lasting and, in many cases, national visibility. The United Daughters put up markers as far away as Arizona, New Mexico and Washington, which weren’t even states at the time of the war.

Officials with the United Daughters did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment. But in a statement on its website, the organization says that its markers “simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely” and that its members have “stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.”

That’s not the history NPR found.

In November 1914, the United Daughters gathered for the group’s annual convention at the swanky DeSoto hotel in Savannah, Ga., to hear the keynote speaker, the group’s national historian, Mildred Lewis Rutherford.

“Slavery was no disgrace,” Rutherford told the women, according to records from the convention. “The Negro race should give thanks daily. … [Slaves] were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe. …

“In all the history of the world, no peasantry was ever better cared for, more contented or happier,” she said.

As she read these words, there hadn’t been a slaveholder in the U.S. for half a century. But Rutherford’s speech drove toward her final point: Slaveholders needed to be defended.

“These wrongs must be righted and the Southern slaveholder defended as soon as possible,” she said.

Records in state archives show the group began requiring chapters to form “memorial marker committees” and focus their efforts on fundraising.

And they haven’t stopped. While many groups have begun taking down Confederate symbols, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has helped put up 47 more markers over the last two decades.

“Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them”

So it was no surprise that when Bryan Stevenson arrived in Montgomery in the 1980s, long before he gained national acclaim for his work as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and went looking for markers about slavery, he couldn’t find one.

He says he counted 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy back then as he drove around town. “Almost a preoccupation with mid-19th-century history,” he recalls. “But you could not find the word ‘slave,’ ‘slavery’ or ‘enslavement’ anywhere in the city.”

In 2013, Stevenson thought that this should change. He called up the Alabama Historical Association. He says the group sounded supportive.

“They said, ‘Oh, if it’s truthful, just give us the information and we’ll put it up,”’ Stevenson recalls. “We went to them and gave them a 60-page memo documenting the history we had investigated. And we got an email back that said, ‘Yeah, your information is all true and correct, but we can’t put up markers about slavery. That would be too controversial.'”

In that moment, Stevenson says, he understood what the United Daughters and other groups had figured out a century earlier: If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.

Working with communities, Stevenson and his organization have now privately funded and erected more than a hundred markers telling the stories of lynchings in America.

Many communities have embraced the markers. A few markers have faced hostility. Two were stolen after they went up.

They’re just a small dent in the vast landscape of Confederate markers, but Stevenson says he’s not looking for even numbers.

“If we are effective at telling the truth about our history,” he says, “we will change our relationship to honoring things that are not honorable. We will.”

The association that once turned Stevenson down now has new leadership. Scotty Kirkland took over as chairman of the association’s Historical Marker Committee in 2015, and he agrees with Stevenson.

“Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them,” Kirkland says. “The first markers put out by the association, it looks like they were basically done by fiat. There’s no real racial diversity in these stories. There are no women marked in these early markers.”

Kirkland says the group is now funding a History Revealed initiative for new stories. The association has quietly removed the Confederate flag from several markers over the past couple of years.

But changing the narrative can be hard, especially when old markers are rarely rewritten or removed.

Many state officials told NPR that, outside the publicly sourced database or markers they helped sponsor, they have no way to know the entirety of the markers in their states.

Only a few states, including Alabama, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, have undertaken efforts to review existing markers. In Minnesota, officials drove out to 206 markers that the state historical society either paid for or helped put up. Officials told NPR they discovered every single one of them had a problem — from grammar issues to offensive language.

Meanwhile, three states — Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee — recently passed laws prohibiting the removal of markers on public land, making little allowance for how old, wrong, misguided, confusing or offensive they might be.

In the absence of being able to take markers down, many heritage organizations find it easier to just add new ones. In Alabama, another group, the Alabama Historical Commission — whose director controversially left in 2004, saying pro-Confederate attitudes pushed him out — now says it too is ready to move on from Confederate stories.

On a recent day, historian Theo M. Moore, who until recently was the commission’s African American heritage coordinator, stood in front of one of the group’s newest efforts. It’s a marker to Claudette Colvin, a young Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus before Rosa Parks.

Moore says it’s “a reminder that this was a place of importance.”

“We’ve been taught the same history, especially in the South,” he says. “This is how all these stereotypes come about. What is presented all the time is negativity.”

As if on cue, a neighbor, Arthur Sanders, walks across the street to tell Moore how much he likes the new marker.

“Our neighborhood disappeared, man, but that,” he says, pointing to the marker, “that makes a difference because it’s the start of trying to get our neighborhood back.”

Moore smiles. As he gets back in his car, Moore says he knows it’s just a metal sign. Most people don’t even read them. But as he pulls away, he says Sanders is right: how you tell history shapes how you see the future.

And lately, he says, something else has been bothering him.

“We have all these cities named after Creek Native Americans: Wetumpka, Tuskegee, Notasulga, Loachapoka, Opelika, Tuscaloosa. … That’s all Native American, right?” he says, pausing. “Where’s, you know, where’s their markers?”

The Native American story

Across the country, more than 15,000 markers mention Native Americans. But the history written on them often isn’t theirs.

If there are two sides on the American frontier, NPR found the nation’s historical markers come down solidly on the side of white settlers. At least 200 markers tell an eerily similar American tale: Native Americans attacked innocent white settlers for no reason.

Darla Gebhard knows this story well.

A research librarian at the Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm, Minn., she walked through a 170-year-old cemetery there, past rows of gravestones.

“I’ll show you what was going through their mind if we come over here,” she says. “You’ll see the gravity of it.”

She stops in front of dozens of graves. Their names have faded with time: John Schneider, Julius Fenske, Ernst Dietrich and many more. But the words carved underneath are clear:

“Killed by Indians, killed by Indians, killed by Indians,” Gebhard says, reading each one. “You have entire families that lost their lives. This is what the reality was for them in 1862.”

Gebhard is right — this was the reality for many people who lived on the Minnesota plains in the 1800s. It wasn’t, however, the reality for all the people who lived here.

John Robertson, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a descendant of Minnesota Dakotas, stood at the edge of an expansive field in southern Minnesota known as Cansa’yapi, homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in an area the federal government calls the Lower Sioux Agency.

“We’re looking out over what would have been in 1862 the tall grass prairie,” he says. “Even today you don’t see any trees, and that’s the way it would have been for 250 miles.”

Three years ago, Minnesota agreed to return 114 acres of the prairie back to the tribe, acknowledging the land had never belonged to the state in the first place.

When tribal members took over the property, they also took over management of 22 state historical signs. As Robertson heads out onto a nearby path, he sums up what many of them said.

“You know, this poor settler family was massacred, and they had no defenses — the women were violated and the children were taken,” he says. “I mean, that’s the kind of language that are on these markers.”

Robertson, who is site manager for the property, says tribal members spent a long time considering each one. And then they made a decision: to take them all down.

On a recent day, Robertson heads out on the trails to see how things are going, along with Amber Annis, who is Cheyenne River Lakota and an associate vice president with the Minnesota Historical Society. They’re helping the tribe replace the signs. As a crew bangs new signs into the ground, they toss the old ones into a heap on the grass.

Robertson says it wasn’t just the signs that called tribal members savages or described violent acts that troubled him. It was all the signs they weren’t even on — as if the history of this place hadn’t happened at all.

Annis stops in front of a stone building along the path and reads the old sign. “The [Stone Warehouse] is 43 by 23 feet, 20 feet in height, with a good substantial cellar 8 feet deep,” she says. “The cellar walls are 3 feet. The first-story walls [are] 2 feet, and the second-story walls are 18 inches thick.”

Robertson shakes his head. The sign, including all the dimensions, isn’t wrong, he says. It’s oblivious.

The warehouse was the spark that started the U.S.-Dakota wars. It’s why all those settlers in the cemetery died and an untold number of Dakotas with them.

“This was the flashpoint of the actual war beginning here and the establishment of the conquered status of the Dakota nation,” Robertson explains.

The Dakotas were once one of the most formidable forces in the Americas, known for their brilliant political and military strategy. But after the U.S. government took their land and prohibited them from hunting or farming, the tribe was forced to accept a treaty. One of the things it promised was food payments from the Stone Warehouse.

Except that in the summer of 1862, the government, mired in the Civil War, stopped providing food. According to letters from the time, the federal agent in charge locked the warehouse, and the main trader told the Dakotas they could “eat grass or their own dung.”

Facing starvation after years of broken promises, the Dakotas declared war.

Robertson reads the beginning of the new sign, which will be written in both Dakota and English.

“The warehouse was a central scene during the outbreak of the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862,” the new sign says. “Its contents were burned out during the war but the structure remained.”

As Robertson and Annis continue down the gravel path, the new signs tell the story of the Dakotas: the arrival of the Europeans on their land, the loss of that land, the decimation of the tribe. They are plot points obscured by the old signs.

Robertson stops at one old sign that tells of a boat landing that it says “was perhaps the busiest spot at the agency which brought steamboats, supplies and even tourists here in the 1850s.”

These tourists, it says, enjoyed the “sights and sounds” of the blacksmith shop and sawmill.

But that’s not the whole story. Newspaper advertisements from 1858 show that tour guides promised tourists that they could watch Dakota warriors in traditional dress collect food payments.

“Being Native, you grow up, wherever you go, you already know it’s going to be something that’s not true,” Annis says. “It’s harmful. I have two daughters. I think about them a lot. When they come to places like this, they will be able to see themselves in different ways.”

Some of the new signs detail the Dakotas’ military successes, including a victory over a company of Fort Ridgely soldiers near the river.

But Robertson and Annis know how the story ends. The federal government marshaled hundreds of soldiers until the Dakotas surrendered and then hanged 38 of them and removed the rest of the tribe from Minnesota. Robertson says he’s not trying to change that history.

He’s trying to explain why it mattered.

“Hopefully when you read it, the sign is going to speak to you in a different and continuing way,” Robertson says. “That’s the goal of the signage. Then you would say, ‘I heard something about that,’ or ‘I want to know more about that.’ And it’s going to be alive for you. I hope.”

Throughout the rest of the state, though, the signs speak the same way they did a hundred years ago.

On a grassy median in a busy New Ulm intersection, one marker describes the “depredations of the savages” who “massacred nearly all the whites.”

Another, using a racial slur, claims Native Americans “had no pity for women or children.” In Morton, a marker praises the “brave, faithful … loyal Indians who saved the lives of white people.” Rarely are Native Americans referred to by name.

On the New Ulm courthouse lawn, a marker congratulates the settlers for creating New Ulm.

“It’s paying homage to the pioneers who founded the territory of Minnesota,” says Gebhard, the Brown County historian.

Asked whether the Dakotas could say they founded the area, Gebhard says, “Oh, absolutely. And so if the Dakotas put up a marker saying this is our homeland, they would be absolutely correct in doing so.”

But this idea of dueling markers — that stories can be told two ways, should be told in two ways — is problematic for historians.

“It doesn’t do justice to the idea that we want to tell a full and complete story,” says Chantel Rodriguez, senior public historian with the Minnesota Historical Society, which is reviewing the state’s markers. “That means weaving together the perspectives. What if you only see one marker and not the other? The reason why we feel the need to have separate markers is because we want to retain the original story.”

The courageous stories of both settler families and Native American families can be told together. But they rarely are.

On the back of the courthouse pioneer marker in New Ulm is the name of every town resident who died in the U.S.-Dakota wars fighting for their families. There’s no marker in the database that lists the names of the Dakotas who died fighting for theirs.

Gebhard said a member of the Dakotas asked her about this once.

“I was doing a downtown tour with a Dakota person, and she asked me, ‘What do people in New Ulm think about the Dakota war?'” Gebhard recalls. “And I said, ‘They don’t.’ And then this person said, ‘Well, why is that?’ And I said, ‘Because we won.'”

A murder shrouded in secrecy

When it comes to the nation’s history, though, exactly who “we” is, is no longer clear. Where once markers might have merely entertained travelers, by sheer volume over the course of a century they have become, instead, an entire nation’s history book, its first social media campaign.

They spread hate, and joy. And they have unlocked secrets, even ones from a long-forgotten murder on the edge of a two-lane highway near Gadsden, Alabama.

A local from the area, Jerry Smith, pulled his car onto U.S. 11. Asked what Gadsden is known for, he paused.

“Not a damn thing,” he said.

But that’s not true, at least not anymore. Just up this road is a new historical marker saying otherwise. Smith was just a teenager when it all started in 1963, as he drove down this highway in his green Chevrolet Corvair.

That’s when he saw a strange man walking down the road, with a sign over his body, pulling a wagon. Smith knew he was what Alabama’s then-governor, George Wallace, had warned about.

“His favorite term was ‘outside agitators,'” Smith says of Wallace. “If they would leave us alone in Alabama, everything is fine. But these ‘outside agitators’ are fanning racial fire. Well, it was George Wallace that was fanning racial fire. But, you know, early on I might have been a little too dumb to know that.”

As he slowed down to pass the man, Smith was surprised to see that he looked just like any other guy. The two locked eyes. Smith thinks the man may have even smiled a little.

So when, just a couple of hours later, someone shot the man point-blank in the face and throat and left his body on the side of the road, Smith was deeply troubled. And yet, no one dared talk about it.

“There was a lot of people that thought this guy, walking down the road pulling a buggy, we didn’t need him,” Smith remembers. “And there was some people that [said] he’s not fit for being here. We oughta kill him, you know?”

The man was William Lewis Moore, a white postal worker from Baltimore, on a one-man protest march. His murder has never been solved.

For years, it bothered Smith. What bothered him more, though, was the silence.

“The years passed by — other things happened,” Smith says. “This lost significance in the eyes of Alabamians.”

And then one day, as he was driving, it dawned on Smith what he could do about it.

“I thought, ‘At least we ought to have a plaque,'” he says.

At first, people told him not to do it. Let the past lie, they said. One person even messaged him on Facebook saying that it might be dangerous.

But Smith kept talking about it, calling people. And then one afternoon, he went and made a speech in front of the county commission, and the commissioners voted unanimously to pay for it.

On the day it was unveiled, several dozen people came out in the rain to see it.

“William Lewis Moore … was assassinated at this location during a 400-mile protest march from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi,” reads the marker, planted in a gravel patch between the road and the train tracks. Someone left flowers at its base.

Then, something strange happened. People in the community started talking openly about the murder. Moore’s death was no longer a community secret. It was history — public history — right there on the side of the road.

And now at the diner, the town museum, even the local sheriff’s office, lots of people will tell you details that many people knew: that Moore stopped at a grocery store along the road, that he got into a confrontation with the store manager in the parking lot, that the manager’s name was Floyd Simpson.

“He’s the one everyone thought did it, thinks did it,” says Johnny Grant, the assistant sheriff for Etowah County, who has spent 48 years in law enforcement here, speaking publicly about Simpson for the first time.

Grant hadn’t joined the sheriff’s office yet at the time of the murder, but some of his closest friends were on duty that night. Grant says they all suspected Simpson.

He says he even quietly reinvestigated the case years ago, when he became chief investigator, to see whether more could be done. But Simpson was already dead. He died 26 years ago.

The idea of Simpson as suspect wasn’t too much of a stretch. There was the public confrontation, for one thing. And Grant says police records show Simpson was in the Ku Klux Klan.

Plus, a witness saw what looked like Simpson’s Buick sitting on the side of the road just before the murder. And finally, a state forensic technician said he believed the bullet matched Simpson’s gun.

But the grand jury declined to indict Simpson, and people in the town put the whole thing behind them.

“The evidence, to me, I would have charged him,” Grant says, “and I would have been able to charge him now, however many years later. But they took it to the grand jury, and the grand jury refused to indict him.”

Today, Grant is also an Etowah County commissioner. When Jerry Smith came forward one day asking for marker money, Grant quickly voted yes. He says he wanted the story told.

“That was just hate,” Grant says of the murder.

He calls the marker one of the best things the county has done.

“It will always be a black eye to Etowah County,” Grant says of the killing. “I just hope as law enforcement they did everything they could to solve it.”

Now, that black eye is on the side of the road for everyone to see, part of the American story. Moore’s marker and tens of thousands of others like it are all pieces of that story, staked into the ground to mark a place in time and make it permanent.

But, like the story of William Lewis Moore’s death, how the nation sees its past keeps changing anyway.

Audio for this story was produced by Graham Smith. It was edited by Robert Little. Additional reporting by Tilda Wilson and Tirzah Christopher. Design, development and illustrations by Connie Hanzhang Jin. Graphics editing by Alyson Hurt. Digital project coordination by Desiree F. Hicks. Photo editing by Emily Bogle. Copy editing by Preeti Aroon.