Behind the Most Ambitious History-Based Civics Project in the United States

An interview with former Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan

Dr. Colleen J. Shogan served as the 11th Archivist of the United States, the first woman in American history appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Prior to becoming Archivist, Colleen served in several cultural heritage leadership roles. She was Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association, worked in the United States Senate, and served as a senior executive at the Library of Congress and its Congressional Research Service. She was the Vice Chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the United States Capitol Historical Society. She also serves on the Board of Advisers for Historiq, a company combining technology and archival tools to improve public access.

A native of the Pittsburgh area, she holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Colleen is the 2024 recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert Humphrey Award for outstanding public service.

She is a senior advisor at More Perfect and is launching a new project with them called In Pursuit, acting as CEO. In addition to her role at More Perfect, she is also a Senior Fellow in Civics Education at Stand Together and an Adjunct Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

I was excited to ask Colleen about her time as Archivist for the United States as well as her current work on In Pursuit.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Marco Lama: As an introduction for people who are watching or reading, you served as the 11th US Archivist from May 2023 to February 2025, when you were fired without explanation by the Trump administration, which I’d like to talk about in a bit. You now lead an educational program called In Pursuit, which I’d also like to talk about, which is part of the nonprofit group More Perfect. To start out, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your journey to becoming the 11th Archivist of the United States, what that path looked like.

Colleen Shogan: I’m not an archivist by training. I’m actually a political scientist, and I’ve had a really, I guess you could say, unconventional career. I started out in academia. I came to the Washington DC area as an assistant professor of American government at George Mason University and thought that I would probably be in academia the rest of my professional career. After a few years of George Mason, I decided to take a fellowship with the American Political Science Association, their congressional Fellowship Program, which takes academics out of their settings for one year and places them on Capitol Hill as policy experts, legislative assistants, and gives them that opportunity to engage on Capitol Hill, working for Congress and in public service. I did that with the idea that I would be able to come back to the classroom much more well versed about Congress and being able to really serve my students much better, particularly in the Washington DC area, because a lot of those students have either internship or actual career experience [in] places like Capitol Hill or the White House or the executive branch. I enjoyed it so much that I actually never went back full time to academia, although I’ve continued to teach courses ever since at Georgetown, and I actually am teaching there right now this semester.

So, from Capitol Hill, from working in the Senate, then I went to the Library of Congress, at the Congressional Research Service, and I worked there for many years, I think about eight years at CRS, and I eventually ended up as the number two in the agency, as the deputy director at CRS. Then, another really pivotal moment in my career, when the Library of Congress was undergoing the leadership change, Dr. Billington was leaving the library, and there was going to be new leadership coming on board, and they wanted to focus very much on some of the outreach aspects of the Library of Congress, everything not collections based. How does the library reach out to Americans to use the Library of Congress and use its rich resources, engage in programming, its exhibits, its publishing program, everything from that to its visitors program and even its gift shop. I was asked to come and start that unit with another senior person named Jane McAuliffe, who was already at the library, and I said I don’t really know anything about running big programs like the National Book Festival. I certainly don’t know that much about giving tours of the Library of Congress, things like that. But they wanted someone that had a lot of government experience, which at that point in time, having been the number two at CRS, I certainly did have. So, I left CRS for six months on a detail to go in the main part of the library and help stand this unit up at the Library of Congress, and then I actually never returned to CRS. I enjoyed it so much.

But that was really important, because that was my exposure to how these institutions, like the National Archives, like the Library of Congress, how they operate as institutions. And I couldn’t have done my job as Archivist of the United States without having had that experience. Eventually, I left the the Library of Congress to go to the White House Historical Association as their senior vice president to run their educational initiatives and all of their history research. I was there at White House Historical—which is a non partisan organization, so […] no matter who is in the White House, [they work] very closely with the President, oftentimes the first lady—I was at White House Historical Association when I was nominated by the President to serve as Archivist of the United States.

Marco: As I mentioned before, in 2025 you were fired by the Trump administration with no explanation, which, if I’m correct, you still haven’t received. I’m assuming that this was unexpected and that you were in the middle of ongoing processes and projects. Could you talk about what those were and how that abrupt transition might have affected their development?

Colleen: Sure. It was surprising in that I had a good relationship with the first lady, Mrs. Trump, because I had worked with her at the White House Historical Association. I had worked with her at the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, where I served as the vice chair of that federal commission. Then, when I was the Archivist of the United States, I invited Mrs. Trump to come to the National Archives when President Biden was in office to speak at a naturalization ceremony. Because, of course, Mrs. Trump is only one of two first ladies in American history to be foreign born and then become a [naturalized] American citizen after birth. I thought she would be a great speaker for that ceremony, which she was. She gave a terrific speech about her own path to citizenship in the United States and what that meant to her. [It was a] totally non political, non partisan speech for the naturalization ceremony. I had worked with the Trump administration before. I certainly wasn’t an enemy, I would say, of any administration. [I was] in the interests of serving the American people. I was interested, of course, in continuing my services as Archivist of the United States, as did all the other archivists before me who had always continued over to subsequent administrations from the administration who nominated them for the position. So, there was no precedent for the Archivist of the United States leaving when a new president comes into office or is inaugurated.

Two things I was working on: I had the blueprint of a new strategic plan for the National Archives, which was very focused on opening up the National Archives, and focusing on users as much as possible, on getting as many Americans as possible to understand and feel comfortable with utilizing the records of the National Archives. [Not] just to Pulitzer Prize winning historians or journalists that use the records, which, of course, [they’re] familiar with, but trying to figure out ways in which we could make all Americans excited about using the Archives and those records and learning about our shared history. So, that was one thing I was in midstream of implementing.

The other thing, which I was just starting, which I think is actually the existential problem at the National Archives, is creating a new technology system that would be able to intake, to process, and then provide access to the eventual billions of born digital records that the National Archives will be responsible for curating in the future. As you might imagine, record keeping is transitioning from paper records to born electronic records, whether that’s memos, photographs, films, emails, chat messages. All of those things are going to come into accession to the National Archives in digital format, and that will require an entirely new technological system to be able to handle that level and amount of data. So, I was just starting a project in which we would start to plan [what] I thought was probably, at least, a five-to-six year project and maybe all the way up to seven or eight years. To do the planning for building that system and then acquiring the funding to build that system […] would cost well over $100 million to build, and I was just starting that project. I think it’s the biggest problem National Archives faces.

Marco: You mentioned funding. If I’m correct, there were actually a lot of funding cuts planned for the National Archives. What are the consequences of not only not having an infrastructure built to handle all these digital born records but also cuts into the existing budget for the rest of records processing.

Colleen: Well, there [weren’t] any cuts planned when I was the archivist, because I made it my business. Once again, remember my background. I worked on Capitol Hill for years. I worked at the Library of Congress CRS, where I helped advocate for the budget of CRS for many years. So, I understood the budget process in Washington, DC. I’ve worked with appropriators for a long time in Congress. I understood the rhythm, and we got to work immediately to try to increase the National Archives budget, not in an irresponsible way. [We wanted to do things] in a way that was very incremental, so that we could start to build for the digital future of the National Archives. Those cuts to the National Archives have come, obviously, since my departure, but you are right that those cuts absolutely exacerbate an already difficult problem, because the budget of the National Archives was stretched very thin just to handle the paper or the analog records. The National Archives has about 13 and a half billion paper analog records in its possession right now. Imagine layering on [top of that]. That paper is not going away. That’s not going anywhere. You have to still maintain that, and it’s still going to be added to, as records schedules play out for the next several decades. The additions of the paper records will start to diminish only to be overwhelmed by the exponential increase of digital records that will be coming into the Archives’ possession. So, you’ve got to be able to play offense and defense, is what I like to say. We had to continue to take care of those paper records and provide access to them and digitize them, in many cases. But then we had to start to create the system for the Archives’ digital future, and that was going to require additional investments, not [the] $100 million necessarily in one year. In fact, I told members of Congress, don’t give me $100 million in one year, because that would be very difficult for us to be able to obligate and get the contracts in place to be able to do this. Instead, let’s plan it [in] a very responsible way [so] that we can add to this budget over the next five or six or seven years, and, as we continue to build this system, we can continue to provide modest funding for it.

Marco: I understand that one of the concerns is that American citizens won’t have a system of accessing these records, but is there a worry that, if there’s just such a huge volume of records coming in and there isn’t the right infrastructure to receive them, is it possible that some records just get lost?

Colleen: Probably not. That’s probably not the biggest worry, because one thing that the federal government has done pretty well is be able to have the ability to do cloud computing and have storage on cloud infrastructures. It’s not just on one cloud infrastructure. It’s replicated amongst many different companies that provide that cloud storage. So, I don’t think that the records will just evaporate or go away, necessarily. They would, in the worst case scenario, sit on some version of multiple cloud storage infrastructure. But, in some ways, okay, that’s good. I mean, it’s sitting there, right? So, it’s not been erased or anything like that, or necessarily lost. But, for an American citizen, the fact that it’s there is comforting, maybe for future generations, when you eventually solve the problem, but [it] will not help people that want to gain access to those records, if there’s no application that facilitates the search of those records.

Marco: I also mentioned you are now working with the nonprofit group More Perfect, as the CEO for the program In Pursuit. Could you talk about a little bit about what that project is, what its goals are, what the process behind it is?

Colleen: We think it’s the most ambitious history based civics project in the United States for 2026. The goal of the project is to try to discover the most relevant lessons about America’s past 250 years, to inform our present and our future. That’s a tall order. So, the way in which we’re able to do that, the methodology, is that we’ve recruited some very famous, prominent and well respected historians, journalists, public servants, former presidents, former first ladies, the current Chief Justice of the United States, former Secretary of State Condi Rice, to write short essays about all of our presidents in American history and select first ladies. These essays are only 1200 words, so I would say most people would be able to read one of these essays in 10 to 15 minutes. So, you can do it in the morning [when] you wake up, if you have [the essays] delivered to your to your email account, we release them every week. Or you can read it at your lunch hour, if you take a lunch break. Or in the evening, when you have a moment or two. It’s not the same as reading an 800-page presidential biography, which we, of course, encourage people to do, but not everybody has all that time to be able to do it. So, if you’re curious about American history, we will provide you with an overview of American history and identify some of the most relevant lessons you can learn from our past over the course of 2026. We’re going chronologically, so we started with George Washington and Martha Washington, and we will end with Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in December of 2026.

Marco: And there’s also a podcast, if I’m correct.

Colleen: Thanks for reminding me. Our podcast just debuted last week. It’s called In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan. We’re going to have about 30 episodes this season. [The podcast] enables us to talk to some of our authors of these essays we have. We’re writing about 73 essays in the In Pursuit project, between the presidents and first ladies. But the podcast enables us to sit down with some of our authors and have a 30 minute conversation about their essay. So, we’re able to get into more detail and more depth and hear from some of these really prominent thinkers of our time and share some of their historical gems and wisdom about these very interesting individuals.

Marco: The first [essay] on George Washington was written by former President George W. Bush. What’s the process behind how you reached out about those essays? Did people have a choice over which presidents they got to talk about? Was it just, Here’s the president, what do you think is the most important lesson that we can learn from this person? Could you tell me more about that?

Colleen: I tended to allow the former presidents to pick which president they wanted to write about. We were also building the project at the same time, so it was a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle, but we certainly wanted all of our former presidents and former first ladies to be comfortable and excited about the person they were they were writing about. That’s because, as you said, In Pursuit is a project of More Perfect, and More Perfect is a bipartisan alliance of presidential centers, presidential foundations, presidential sites from all across the country, representative of, really, all of our former presidents and also civic organizations from all across the country. So, we have a pretty wide reach at More Perfect. It’s led by John Bridgeland, who happened to work for President Bush in his first term of office. So, we have good connections to be able to reach out to the former presidents and former first ladies and explain the project to them and their team.

But, I will tell you, it was not that difficult to convince them to participate. All of the former presidents—and actually the first ladies, signed up, in some cases, before the presidents. They were on board. They were really excited about it. And then the presidents came in soon thereafter—But it really wasn’t a heavy lift for either of them, because they were very excited to participate in a project that was going to showcase and highlight American history for our 250th anniversary and [..] was also decidedly nonpartisan in its approach. We weren’t coming at history with a particular ideological lens. Even though a lot of the people who are writing for In Pursuit have a lot of opinions about what’s going on in the world and the United States today, we asked them to really set those beliefs aside and write these essays in a very accessible fashion, so that any American, no matter who they voted for in the past several elections, would feel comfortable in reading these essays and could learn from them.

Marco: That’s actually is a great segue into my next question. As you mentioned, this is, in large part, connected to America’s 250th anniversary. You [also] mentioned the non partisan aspect of the project. I think we’re in a moment right now [in which] the country is both broadly polarized and also facing a lot of real anti-democratic threats from the current administration. Things like financial self enrichment, a violent immigration program, attacks on federal institutions, eroding trust in elections. I’m curious how you see the ways that the non partisan character of In Pursuit maybe addresses those aspects of our moment that seem to extend beyond merely a general sense of partisanship and polarization, or if they’re connected somehow.

Colleen: I could group [the lessons our essays look at] very loosely into three different categories. Some of them are about character, so about individual characteristics or virtues that are important that we’ve seen in presidents and first ladies and public figures. They are also lessons generally about leadership, not just political leadership. [They are] trying to broaden those lessons of leadership, so that anybody in any leadership position, whether that’s in your PTA or civic association, within your own business, leadership within your own company, that these lessons of leadership will be relevant to you. Then there [are] also lessons about democracy, lessons about our institutions. What has made a democratic republic like the United States flourish, and, sometimes, what have been the challenges? What have been some of the successes and failures? For example, what’s the role of compromise in a large scale Democratic Republic like the United States? When does compromise work? And when does compromise actually, in some cases, make the situation worse, because you’re not actually solving the key problem at hand that is dividing the country? So, I think all of those types of lessons, whether it’s about character, whether it’s about leadership, or whether it’s about democracy in our institutions and the practices of democracy, speak to the time we find ourselves in.

Marco: The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel recently claimed that The 1978 Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional, that the president doesn’t have to turn over his or her presidential records at the end of their administration. Do you anticipate that a transfer of presidential documents to the National Archives will occur at the end of this administration?

Colleen: I think a lot of that will depend on what the courts will decide, because there has already been a lawsuit about the OLC opinion that has been filed from the American Historical Association and then an oversight group, and so that will start winding its way through the federal court system, starting in district court, and we will have to see about what the courts say concerning the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act.

Marco: My final question—and thanks again for giving your time today—is about your experience working with the National Archives. Was there anything about working with those records, getting to see them and manage them, that changed your perspective on the history of the United States?

Colleen: That’s a really a great question. I don’t know if anything changed my interpretation or opinion. What I was affected most by, as Archivist of the United States, was actually watching other people experience the National Archives. So, when I worked in Washington, DC—we have Archives locations all around the country. So I traveled an awful lot, but my home office was in Washington, DC, at the National Archives Building, situated right off the mall—of course, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are in the rotunda, very close to my office. I [would] love to come into the rotunda either at lunch hour, or sometimes right at the end of the day, because there was a big rush of people that would come in around four o’clock or 4:15 to try to come and see everything before the Archives closed at five o’clock. So, those were the reliable times when there would be big crowds at the National Archives. [I had] seen those documents hundreds and hundreds of times, but it was great to be able to see people see them, in many cases, for the first time, and also to be able to see them, maybe in many cases, for the only times they will see them in their entire lives. And then to be able to talk with people casually about it, why they were there, why they thought it was important, why it was important for them to actually see—anybody can see these documents online. You can read them online. They’re readily available—but to actually see the physical embodiment of these documents and why that was important.

So, what I learned from all of that was that Americans actually love American history. Americans are enthusiastic about American history. They don’t think that American history divides us. They want to learn more from American history. I think that experience was what encouraged me, when I left the National Archives and More Perfect asked me to come on board, to lead In Pursuit. That was one of the things that encouraged me that this was a good idea to do this, that if we actually were able to make American history accessible and interesting and relevant and exciting and easy for people to consume, that we would have millions of people that would want to interact with these essays. And we’ve seen that already. We’ve already had close to 3 million social media hits on these essays. They’ve been viewed on Substack I think over 600,000 times, just on Substack alone. Then we have people listening to the essays that are being recorded, and then listening to the podcast, tens of thousands of downloads for the podcast on audio and video. So, people are really eager for this type of learning, especially in 2026, but I think at any moment in time, we just have to be, as historians and political scientists, willing to provide it.

Marco: Well, Colleen, thanks again, so much. And, like you said, I’m also eager to keep checking out the podcasts and the essays as they come out.

Colleen: Thank you so much. Follow us on In Pursuit, obviously on Substack, and you can find us, if you aren’t on Substack, on our website, InPursuit.org, and you can sign up for our essays, and we’ll make sure that they’re delivered to your inbox.

Marco: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Colleen: Thank you.

Marco: Bye.

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