Position names are extra than simply labels on a map. They affect how folks be informed in regards to the global round them and understand their position in it.
Names can ship messages and counsel what’s and isn’t valued in society. And the way in which that they’re modified through the years can sign cultural shifts.
The US is in the middle of a place-renaming second. From the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of The united states, to the go back of Forts Bragg and Benning and the newly re-renamed Mount McKinley in Alaska’s Denali Nationwide Park, we’re witnessing a consequential shift within the politics of position naming.
This unexpected rewriting of the country’s map – performed to “restore American greatness,” consistent with President Donald Trump’s govt order that made a few of them authentic – is a part of a reputation sport that acknowledges position names as robust manufacturers and political equipment.
In our analysis on position naming, we discover how this “name game” is used to claim regulate over shared symbols and embed diffused and not-so-subtle messages within the panorama.
As geography lecturers and researchers, we additionally acknowledge the learning and emotional affect the call sport will have at the public.
Position names will have mental results
Renaming a spot is at all times an act of energy.
Other folks in energy have lengthy used position naming to say regulate over the identification of where, bolster their reputations, retaliate towards combatants and succeed in political objectives.
Those strikes will have sturdy mental results, specifically when the call inspires one thing threatening. Converting a spot call can basically shift how folks view, relate to or really feel that they belong inside that position.
In Shenandoah County, Virginia, scholars at two faculties at the start named for Accomplice generals had been on an emotional curler coaster of brand name adjustments in recent times. The colleges have been renamed Mountain View and Honey Run in 2020 amid the nationwide uproar over the homicide of George Floyd, a Black guy killed via a police officer in Minneapolis.
4 years later, the native college board reinstated the unique Accomplice names after conservatives took regulate of the board.
One Black 8th grader at Mountain View Top College — now re-renamed Stonewall Jackson Top College — testified at a board assembly about how the deliberate trade would have an effect on her:
“I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves. If this board decides to restore the names, I would not feel like I was valued and respected,” she mentioned. The board nonetheless licensed the trade, 5-1.
Even outdoor of colleges, position names perform as a “hidden curriculum.” They supply narratives to the general public about how the neighborhood or country sees itself – in addition to whose histories and views it considers necessary or worthy of public consideration.
Position names have an effect on how folks understand, revel in and emotionally connect with their environment in each mindful and unconscious tactics. Psychologists, sociologists and geographers have explored how this feeling of position manifests itself into the psyche, growing both attachment or aversion to position, whether or not it’s a faculty, mountain or park.
A story of 2 forts
Renaming puts can rally a pacesetter’s supporters via rebranding.
Trump’s orders to revive the names Fortress Bragg and Fortress Benning, each at the start named for Accomplice generals, illustrate this impact. The names have been modified to Fortress Liberty and Fortress Moore in 2023 after Congress handed a regulation banning using Accomplice names for federal installations.
Veterans and different visitors posed in 2023 subsequent to a newly unveiled signal for Fortress Moore, named for Lt. Gen. Harold ‘Hal’ Moore, who served in Vietnam, and his spouse, Julia Moore. In 2025, President Donald Trump reverted the call again to Fortress Benning.
Cheney Orr/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Trump made a marketing campaign promise to his fans to “bring back the name” of Fortress Bragg if reelected.
To get across the federal ban, Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth known two unrelated adorned Military veterans with the similar final names — Bragg and Benning — however with none Accomplice connections, to honor as a substitute.
Name it a sleight of hand or a stroke of genius in case you’d like, this tactic allowed the Division of Protection to restore politically charged names with out violating the regulation.
A soldier walks beside an indication that used to be unveiled when Fortress Liberty used to be rededicated as Fortress Bragg all over a rite on base on March 7, 2025.
AP Picture/Chris Seward
The recovery of the names Bragg and Benning might really feel like a symbolic homecoming for individuals who resisted the unique call trade or have emotional ties to the names via their reminiscences of residing and serving at the base, quite than a connection to the precise namesakes.
On the other hand, the names are nonetheless reminders of the army bases’ authentic affiliation with defenders of slavery.
Where-renaming sport
A wave of place-name adjustments all over the Obama and Biden administrations serious about doing away with offensive or derogatory position names and spotting Indigenous names.
As an example, Clingmans Dome, the absolute best top within the Nice Smoky Mountains, used to be renamed to Kuwohi in September 2024, moving the call from a Accomplice common to a Cherokee phrase that means “the mulberry place.”
Below the Trump management, alternatively, place-name adjustments are being complex explicitly to ward off towards reform efforts, a part of a broader attack on what Trump calls “woke culture.”
The view from a lookout tower on Kuwohi, previously referred to as Clingmans Dome, within the Nice Smoky Mountains.
Nationwide Park Carrier
President Barack Obama modified Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Denali in 2015 to recognize Indigenous heritage and a long-standing call for the mountain. Officers in Alaska had asked the call trade to Denali years previous and supported the call trade in 2015.
Trump, on his first day in workplace in January 2025, moved to rename Denali again to Mount McKinley, over the opposition of Republican politicians in Alaska. The state Legislature handed a answer a couple of days later asking Trump to rethink.
Georgia Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter made a up to date legislative proposal to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland” in toughen of Trump’s expansionist need to buy the island, which is an self sustaining territory of Denmark.
Danish officers and Greenlanders noticed Carter’s absurd proposal as insulting and harmful to diplomatic members of the family. It isn’t the primary time that position renaming has been used as a type of symbolic insult in world members of the family.
Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of The united states would possibly have to start with gave the impression fantastic, however it’s already mirrored in commonplace navigation apps.
Google Maps shows the call ‘Gulf of America’ as a substitute of Gulf of Mexico in March 2025.
Google INEGI
A greater manner to make a choice position names
When leaders rename a spot in an abrupt, unilateral model — steadily for ideological causes — they chance alienating communities that deeply connect to the ones names as a type of reminiscence, identification and position attachment.
A greater selection, in our view, can be to make renaming shared landscapes participatory, with alternatives for significant public involvement within the renaming procedure.
This manner does now not steer clear of call adjustments, however it suggests the adjustments must reply to the social and mental wishes of communities and the evolving cultural identification of puts — and now not merely be used to attain political issues.
As an alternative, encouraging public participation — equivalent to via panorama affect tests and demanding audits that take the desires of affected communities critically — can domesticate a way of shared possession within the choice that can give the ones names extra endurance.
The most recent position renamings are already affecting the study room revel in. Scholars don’t seem to be simply memorizing new position labels, however they’re additionally being requested to reevaluate the that means of the ones puts and their very own courting with the country and the arena.
As historical past has proven all over the world, one of the vital main downsides of leaders enforcing call adjustments is that the names will also be simply changed once the following regime takes energy. The outcome is usually a unending call sport.
