essay on our historical monuments

The Inclusive Historian's Handbook

Memorials and Monuments

Memorials and monuments punctuate our lives. Many of us are taught to revere them early on—in town squares, at museums, throughout our national parks, and everywhere in between. We may repeat the ritual with our own children, who may someday bury us beneath smaller though no less meaningful monuments. All the while, we live our lives before the silent gaze of granite soldiers, towering obelisks, historic buildings, roadside crucifixes, memorial bridges, and no end of scattered mementos. Some of them were left by ancestors for reasons that may be obscured by time. Some appear as if overnight, often born of grief for a loved one lost to violence or disregard. People have given their lives in the service of monuments; others have killed to protect them. Love, hate, fear, faith, determination, and deception all inhere in our nation’s commemorative landscape. But what do we really know about these silent sentinels?

We know quite well from our vantage point in the early twenty-first century that memorials, monuments, and other expressions of our nation’s complex public memory are not, in fact, as silent as we might suppose. They have, rather, since the beginning of our national saga, witnessed and prompted impassioned dissent, vocal nationalism, and sometimes lethal violence. We know too from decades of scholarship that memorials and monuments trade in all matter of perceptual trickery. One person’s hero was another’s worst enemy. One town’s achievement meant another’s demise. One empire’s victory signaled the death of families and kingdoms and ecosystems elsewhere. Choices made about which of these memories to enshrine, and which ones to erase, are the messages that memorials and monuments convey today. In this sense, then, memorials are never silent, and they certainly do not reflect consensus. They are rather arguments about the past presented as if there were no argument.

We need monuments, even despite their tendency to misrepresent. At their best, monuments can bind us together and fortify our communities in the face of tragedy or uncertainty. They can also remind us that to be great is worthy of aspiration. The meaning of greatness, however, is never fixed. Indeed, how we define it—how, that is, we choose to remember—has become a matter of pointed concern, especially as Americans seek to expand opportunity among those whose forebears were so long erased from public memory. Is it possible to change a monument’s meaning once it has been built? Is there such a thing as a public memorial that respects the infinite diversity of the American public? These and other questions underlie what headlines and pundits characterize as our nation’s “monument wars,” longstanding contests of memory wherein the very meaning of citizenship is up for grabs.

Defining Terms : Memory, Commemoration, Monuments, and Memorials

Making sense of our monument wars and their history is complicated by the variety of words that are used, often interchangeably, to describe them. Words such as “monument,” “memorial,” and “commemoration” all share in their deep history a root in another complicated word: “memory.” Memory, of course, is as old as humankind, and perhaps older. Historians study memory, as do neuroscientists, physiologists, physicists, sociologists, philosophers, and others besides. The remarkable scope of memory studies and the field’s growth in recent decades, signals how deeply memory runs through all facets of modern life. Historians cannot make sense of memory alone. We have, however, made important contributions to the conversation, especially concerning memory’s capacity to shape ideas about nation and citizenship.

In the United States, for instance, leading memory scholars—including Michael Kammen, David Blight, James Young, and Erika Doss—have advanced a set of propositions, drawn from an array of social and cultural theory, that explain how memory promotes a common sense of American identity over time and across lines of difference. They include the possibility that, in addition to each person’s individual memory, there exists a collective memory too—a stew of facts and images and stories—that shapes and is itself shaped by our personal recollections. There is also the notion that memory can reside in objects and places, and that attending to these is one way that nations sustain our loyalties. Historians are concerned, too, with traumatic memories, such as those associated with war and genocide, and have recently begun to explore the monument’s capacity to aggregate and deploy deep wells of emotion. Running through all of this is an awareness that, if we listen closely, monuments can speak volumes about the intent of their makers. They usually tell us more, in fact, about the people who made them than whatever it is that they commemorate.

The monuments and memorials we are concerned with, then, are expressions of public memory. They are born of individuals whose personal memories get bound up by some common interest within some common corner of some community’s collective memory. The process whereby this confluence of individual memories is vetted and repackaged for public consumption is what we refer to as commemoration. Commemoration itself can be an event, such as is the case with some parades, festivals, and even the preservation of old buildings. What we witness in those instances is a process whereby individuals are instructed—both by watching and by participating—in the performance of fealty to a shared set of ideas about the past: the war was noble, our ancestors were great, remembering is patriotic. These are powerful lessons, so much so that commemoration tends to obscure the possibility of believing otherwise.

The terms that we use to describe the products of commemoration, words such as “monument” and “memorial,” may vary in purpose. “Monument,” for instance, usually refers to a commemorative structure or edifice, whereas “memorial” applies to almost anything—including buildings, books, roads, stadiums—that recalls the dead or the experience of profound loss. The Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., is also a monument, because the structure itself functions as a well of national regard for Lincoln’s sacrifice and vision. Across town, however, only sports fans likely consider the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium a monument. Its tribute to Kennedy’s memory is in name alone. The rules are neither hard nor fast. The National Park Service, for instance, applies the designation “monument” to any unit—whether or not it foregrounds commemoration—that is established by executive order. More significant than these shades of meanings is the ubiquity of words such as “monument” and “memorial” in our daily lives.  Language reveals the extent to which memory surrounds us everywhere and always.

A Brief History of Commemoration in the United States

There is nothing that obligates Americans to remember in the ways that they do. Indeed, the nation’s founders railed against the excesses of memory. In their eyes, the corrosive influence of ancient traditions—such as those that sustained Britain’s monarchy and its landed aristocracy—was precisely what prompted the American Revolution. So how then did commemoration end up being so prevalent in the United States?

Two common explanations deploy two different histories: one deep, the other more recent. In the first case, the American preoccupation with commemoration, and especially the mingling of objects and memory, reaches all the way back to medieval Europe. The early Christian church, as the story goes, sought by the ninth century to entice converts by deploying an array of sacred objects, the so-called cult of saints’ relics. The appeal of these relics—bits of hair, bone, and other vestiges of bygone saints—resided in their power to connect worshipers to the divine, literally, through touch or by mere proximity. Elaborate rituals of belief grew up around these objects and the reliquaries that contained them. Increasingly their power mingled, in early modern Europe, with secular objects of curiosity gathered by explorers and exhibited alongside relics in cathedrals, princely chambers, and curiosity cabinets. Mastery of worlds, human and divine, might be had by whomever could amass the largest collection. Even mystics and clerics got in on the game, imagining elaborate memory theaters from within which one might see, and thus learn to recall, knowledge of all times and places. The ways of knowing associated with these practices, as has been shown by Stephen Greenblatt and cleverly illustrated by Lawrence Weschler, penetrated western culture so deeply that they travelled along with Europeans into North America. Modern-day museums thus recall the ancient impulse to venerate remarkable objects, as do memorials and monuments where visitors might commune with the past by bringing themselves near to all manner of markers and cenotaphs.

In the other case, made by historians such as Alfred Young and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, American commemorative preoccupations are associated with a sense of historical discontinuity that seems to have originated by the 1770s, during the “Age of Revolution,” and which reached a fevered pitch by at least 1900. This story explains why, though the founding generation distrusted monuments, the deaths of its most prominent leaders—first George Washington and, later, Thomas Jefferson—prompted an early wave of commemorative activity by the 1820s. The Civil War, of course, exacerbated this sense of historical rupture and set into motion a commemorative spree that has not yet abated. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans erected obelisks, collected old things—clothes, quilts, furniture, tools, and more—opened museums, founded historical societies, preserved old homes, and staged fetes and festivals all in hopes of staving off their nagging concern that something had been lost amid the ravages of modernity. Their efforts, especially during the years spanning the World Wars, were so expansive that much of the commemorative infrastructure they built remains today.

Since World War II, Americans have experimented with new commemorative forms. During the postwar years, named municipal buildings and commemorative highways replaced a previous generation’s fondness for granite soldiers and obelisks. Monuments to shared loss have also become increasingly common. Inspired by Maya Lin’s widely influential 1982 Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, modern monuments often feature abstract forms and reflective surfaces in place of the figurative literalism preferred a century ago. Impermanent or impromptu memorials have also become a staple of modern commemorative practice. Mounds of stuffed animals, ghost-white bicycles, roadside shrines with hard-hats and t-shirts, car windows airbrushed with sentimental tributes, tattoos, and scores of commemorative websites all reveal our own era’s concern to mourn publicly. It is a shift, as Erika Doss argues, that signals a new period in our commemorative history, one wherein national belonging is reckoned emotionally in acts of public feeling.

The Contours of Memory

Commemorative trends notwithstanding, memorials and monuments are endlessly diverse insomuch as acts of public memory always reflect the particularities of time and place. An uneasy grid of concrete slabs recalls the Holocaust at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany. The “Door of No Return”—part of the Maison des Esclaves on Senegal’s Gorée Island—commemorates the terrors of the Atlantic slave trade. And a commemorative complex in Vietnam’s Quảng Ngãi Province testifies to the rape and slaughter of civilians by U.S. Army soldiers in a place Americans remember as My Lai. These monuments demonstrate that commemoration need not always seek resolution. Indeed, commemorating sites of shame offers an important corrective to triumphant portrayals of the past that inevitably obscure historical complexity. Monuments like these, that are indelibly bound up with American history abroad, also remind us that memory is not confined to national borders. The circulation for centuries of people, capital, and ideas has ensured that all of our memories are entwined within deep networks of global remembrance.

Some monuments and memorials seek to redress lapses in what is presented as “official” public memory. The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Colorado, for instance, now insists—after more than a century of white Coloradans deliberately mischaracterizing the massacre as a battle—that the Arapaho and Cheyenne be reinscribed onto our national memory of westward expansion, which for generations has either omitted Native Americans or dismissed them as mere obstacles to progress. Such is the function of so-called counter monuments. Counter monuments, as James Young suggests, demand a reappraisal of collective memory by demonstrating awareness of their own contrivance. They do so, in some cases, by insisting on the inclusion of people—and, sometimes, entire segments of American society—that have been persistently absented from public memory. In 2017, Philadelphians honored Octavius V. Catto with a statue, the first ever in Philadelphia to commemorate an individual of African descent. Elsewhere, counter monuments do their work by modifying extant monuments or presenting them in a different light. Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko complicated our understanding of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Massachusetts, for instance, with a temporary 1998 installation that projected onto its sides towering videos of mothers torn by the loss of children to neighborhood street violence.

Removing or relocating monuments and memorials can also reveal the deep intensity of contested memory. Beginning in 2015, in response to a mass shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, cities across the United States—including New Orleans, Baltimore, and Los Angeles—opted to remove monuments valorizing the Confederacy and white supremacy from courthouses and parks. Scores of these monuments had been erected throughout the twentieth century to legitimize white supremacy and otherwise shift Americans’ commemorative gaze away from the degradations of slavery. The removal campaign turned violent in August 2017 when white supremacists and their supporters rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly in defense of a monument portraying Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Clashes with counter-protesters resulted in one death and multiple injuries, and appeared to many Americans as a metaphor for the heated debates about race and citizenship that consumed the nation during the presidential election of 2016.

Tomorrow’s Monuments and Memorials

Removal debates remind us that commemoration is always political. Even the most benign monuments are products of choices made about how to remember, what to remember, and how to pay for it all. Faced with this certainty, then, how might we create monuments today that speak beyond our immediate concerns, and to audiences who may not remember in the same ways that we do? History shows us that a good first step is to engage as many constituencies as possible in the commemorative process. Commemoration grows from conversation, and as such should include as many voices as possible. Archiving the conversations that produce monuments is another important step. By preserving a record of our deliberations over public memory, we leave for future generations an indication of what is at stake in our commemorative aspirations. Above all, we must remember that monuments and memorials are neither silent nor innocent. The harder we think about their meanings today, the more likely they are to speak with clarity tomorrow.

Suggested Readings

Allison, David B., ed. Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/AASLH, 2018.

Bruggeman, Seth C., ed. Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Duppstadt, Andrew, Rob Boyette, and Sgt. Damian J.M. Smith. “Planning Commemorations.” Technical Leaflet 241 . American Association for State and Local History.

Glassberg, David. “Public History and the Study of Memory.” The Public Historian 18, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 7-23.

Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Reconsideration of Memorials and Monuments . A special edition of History News 71, no. 4 (Autumn 2016).

~ Seth C. Bruggeman is an associate professor of history at Temple University, where he directs the Center for Public History. His books include Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Born in the USA: Birth and Commemoration in American Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (University of Georgia Press, 2008). You can follow him on Twitter @scbrug and explore his website at https://sites.temple.edu/sethbruggeman .

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The Historian Scrutinizing Our Idea of Monuments

By Alexandra Schwartz

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study session at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire with a handgun, murdering nine Black congregants. Roof’s motivations were clear. He was a white supremacist who wished to start a race war, and he saw his actions as part of a distinctly American legacy. In the weeks before his massacre, Roof posed for photos at a number of Confederate sites, including a graveyard housing the Confederate dead and the Museum and Library of Confederate History, in Greenville, South Carolina. After the murders, officials in states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Louisiana, responding to public outrage, took down eleven monuments to the Confederacy. But, as the art historian Erin L. Thompson notes in her new book, “ Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments ,” the monuments didn’t stay out of sight for long. “Six quickly went back on view in different public locations, including cemeteries, battlefield sites, and a museum,” Thompson writes. Another was placed next to a ferry station on the banks of the Potomac. Others are in storage as plans to reërect them get under way.

It’s not hard to put up a monument in the United States, even when the cause it commemorates is long lost. Taking one down is another story. When New Yorkers heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud, on July 9, 1776, they rushed to destroy the equestrian statue of King George III that stood at Bowling Green, cutting off the monarch’s nose, chopping off his head, and parading with his severed limbs through the streets. More recently, though, the act of dismantling monuments has been decried as unpatriotic and an assault on the history they purport to represent, even as we tend to forget, or obscure, the history of the monuments themselves. Stone Mountain, in Georgia, the country’s largest Confederate monument, began, as Thompson writes, “as a pet project of the Ku Klux Klan”; Christopher Columbus, who never set foot in the continental U.S., is celebrated by statues across the country, in spite of the protests from Indigenous communities.

The contradictions that make up so much of American life are right there on display in our public art, which is why it seems to hold clues to our future as a nation, too. In her book, Thompson, a professor at the City University of New York, explores the stories behind a number of American monuments, the people who wanted them up, and the activists and community members who are fighting for them to come down. I recently spoke with her over Zoom to ask her about her discoveries. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol building, and with Philip Reid, one of the workmen responsible for it. A lot of people are probably vaguely aware that there is a statue on top of the Capitol. But I also think they probably don’t know what it represents, and they certainly don’t know the story of how it got there. So tell us: Who was Philip Reid?

He was an enslaved man owned by Clark Mills, who was the sculptor of the very first American bronze monument, a sculpture of Andrew Jackson. And the success of that sculpture—which still stands outside the White House—meant that he got hired for additional commissions, including to cast, in bronze, a statue symbolizing freedom to top the Capitol dome. It was started before the Civil War, and was put up only after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. So by the time it went up Philip Reid was free, but he worked on it while enslaved. And, in fact, Clark Mills bought additional people from the profits he made from the sculpture of Andrew Jackson.

This is the type of story that led me to write the book. A lot of the debates about monuments have focussed on the character of the person honored—you know, should we be honoring Robert E. Lee or not, et cetera. But I’m more interested in how these objects function as monuments, how they were made, why they were put up, how they’ve been used since. And so Reid’s story seemed really important, because to know that someone was forced to make this representation of a liberty that he didn’t have was deeply compelling to me. And the statue itself was modified under the direction of Jefferson Davis, who would, of course, become the President of the Confederacy—but at that point he was the Secretary of War, charged with supervising the decorations for the Capitol. He made the sculptor change the original design to not include a symbolization of emancipation. He thought that American freedom was the freedom of people who had always been free, had been born free—like him, not like Reid.

The symbol that Davis wanted to replace was a wreath, right?

It was a hat, the Pileus cap. My editor wouldn’t let me say that it’s the type of hat that Smurfs wear. [ Laughs. ]

A liberty cap. And what did they replace it with?

So she wears this Vegas-y headdress, which has an eagle and feathers. And it looks completely ridiculous now.

Right, the irony of trying to craft a symbol of freedom when America was deeply dependent on slavery created actual, practical problems in the representation of freedom.

Exactly. And those problems are hard to see because they were often simply disguised altogether. So it is extremely rare to see a Black person in public art until the twentieth century—even in, say, Northern Civil War memorials, though a large part of the Union forces were African American soldiers.

And, when Black people were included in public art, it seems like they were often included in ways that suggested subservience to their white liberators.

Yeah, and Frederick Douglass, for example, knew that this was a problem as soon as this art went up. He criticized a statue that still stands, in D.C., celebrating Lincoln’s granting of emancipation to African Americans. There’s this grovelling Black man kneeling in front of Lincoln. Ironically enough, that man’s face is modelled after an actual man, who escaped from slavery and then re-escaped after being kidnapped by men who wanted to send him back into slavery. This is Archer Alexander. So he liberated himself twice with no help from Lincoln, but has been made into a powerless recipient of the largesse of white Americans.

It seems like the question of what to do with monuments has sprung into the public eye almost overnight. I was interested to see you write that, before 2015, not a single Confederate monument had come down, but in the year after George Floyd ’s murder, in May of 2020, around a hundred and fifty monuments were destroyed or removed. That’s an enormous shift. I’m wondering whether you had given much thought to America’s monuments before 2020.

I just did the calculations over again, and, as of January 31st, a hundred and forty-two Confederate monuments have been removed since the death of George Floyd, along with seventy-two others, mostly of settlers and Columbus. But just to be picky about removal versus destruction—

Do be picky.

A lot of what I did in this book was ask questions that I thought were stupid. Like, there’s all these news stories of monuments being loaded on the backs of trucks and driven away, so where are those trucks going? And it turns out that no monument has been irrevocably destroyed but one: a single platter-size portrait of Columbus, which was removed from a monument in Connecticut. Otherwise, they’ve all been relocated or are in storage. The Charlottesville Lee monument, which was at the center of the Unite the Right rally in 2017—the city council awarded it to a local nonprofit, which proposed melting it down and giving the bronze to an artist for a new monument. But that process has been stalled by yet another lawsuit from Confederate-heritage groups. So people really, really want to keep these up.

Did I think about monuments before? I didn’t think so much about American monuments. I’m a classicist, and, to me, destroying a monument is a normal part of human life. Practically everything that I studied from ancient sculpture was at one point broken, thrown into a pit, buried, and then dug up again. So when protests started I realized that Americans are in this strange, exceptional period of history where we haven’t replaced a lot of our monuments in a long time, which is very unlike human beings.

The very first equestrian monument that Americans got, a statue of George III, lasted only six years before we tore it down upon reading the Declaration of Independence. So we used to destroy a lot of monuments. In the twentieth century, not so much.

And now there’s this sea change.

I don’t think it’s so much of a sea change. It’s a sea change among a certain audience. Something I did in the book was try and talk to activists who have been protesting particular monuments for, in some cases, decades—their entire adult lives—like Mike Forcia protesting a statue of Columbus in the Twin Cities.

I think the real change has been people who assume that they are praised by these monuments. They’re starting to rethink whether that praise is worth keeping up a monument that pains others.

Another thing that you highlight in your book is how hard it is to remove a monument by any kind of public or legal process. In the past year or two, we’ve seen these dramatic images of protesters tearing down monuments, and people get upset and say that isn’t the right way to go about it. But you write about how, even when people try to approach this in “the right way,” they can’t accomplish anything. I’m thinking specifically of what you write about the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in Birmingham, Alabama. Do you want to tell that story?

I’m such a fangirl of Mayor Woodfin.

Birmingham’s Confederate monument celebrated a past that the city didn’t even have—Birmingham was founded well after the Civil War. It was put up in two parts at the turn of the twentieth century, both parts in response to unionization efforts among area miners. These were interracial efforts, and the city’s [leading citizens], who paid for the statue’s base and then the obelisk that went on top, wanted to persuade white workers that keeping within racial boundaries was more important than making a living wage.

By the nineteen-seventies, Birmingham was a majority Black city, and even less willing to have the monument. But, by the time discussion really started about taking it down, the Alabama state legislature had passed a law prohibiting the removal of monuments more than forty years old, which included this monument and almost all of the state’s Confederate monuments.

And there was simply no discussion possible, regardless of the wishes of the community, unless the majority of the state legislature changed the law. And this is true in a surprisingly large number of U.S. jurisdictions—that removal is not up for debate, it’s simply prohibited by law. Even in jurisdictions like New York, where there are no prohibitions, there’s no process for asking for removal or reconsideration of a monument. So these requests get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

But shortly after the death of George Floyd, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin saw protesters trying to take down the monument, essentially with their hands. And he decided—for public safety, and for the soul of Birmingham—to remove it, to break the law in an act of civil disobedience. The law would impose a fine of twenty-five thousand dollars on the city for any modification of the monument, and he decided it was well worth it. Other [Alabama] cities have also taken down Confederate monuments and paid the fine. In reaction, the state legislature has heard proposals to make the law much stricter, to make any officials who authorize removal, or even vote in approval of removal, personally liable for fines. So it’s no surprise to me that, when you have these very punitive laws, the only way out is going to be an act of civil disobedience.

One argument we hear a lot is that, if we remove monuments, we’ll be getting rid of the history that they represent. But it often seems that what they represent is not necessarily history but the time in which they were erected, as in the case of Birmingham. The period after Reconstruction was a major moment for the creation of monuments to the Confederacy. Why was that?

Well, public art has always been a way for humans to shape societies, to tell members of a community what their roles should be. And a lot of Civil War monuments did precisely that. You might think they went up right after the Civil War, but this is not usually true. In the decades immediately following the war, monuments went up in cemeteries; they were monuments of mourning to commemorate personal losses. But the monuments we see today generally went up only starting in the eighteen-nineties, when Reconstruction was over, and when Jim Crow laws had been passed to reduce the possibility of Black engagement in the political and economic life of the South. They went up as a reminder that this is how things should be—a fantasy of antebellum life where everyone knew their places, and no one was trying to ask for more, whether it was Black Southerners trying to ask for political participation or working-class white Southerners trying to gain more wealth.

So, yeah, I think it’s always more interesting to ask how a monument has shaped its society versus what sort of past it’s commemorating. Monuments are not how we learn about the past. Often, they erase the past. A Northern Civil War monument that shows only white soldiers, for example, is erasing the participation of Black soldiers.

You mention working-class whites. I learned from your book about the pose called parade rest. Why was it so important for the makers of so many Confederate monuments to depict Confederate soldiers in parade rest?

The vast majority of Civil War monuments are not of a named officer but of an unnamed low-ranking soldier. Almost all of these are standing in parade rest, which, according to infantry instruction manuals of the period, was a pose soldiers would take not when fighting—not when doing anything heroic—but when listening to a drill instructor.

So it’s a posture celebrating obedience. Soldiers were forbidden to speak when standing in this position. It’s a posture of listening to your betters, your leaders. And it’s no surprise that these monuments went up in periods of labor unrest, when they could try to convince the descendants of soldiers that they were part of a glorious tradition—not of rebellion but of obedience. These sculptures were paid for by factory owners, by white-collar entrepreneurs, at a time when they were trying to control their employees.

Let’s talk about Stone Mountain, the huge Confederate memorial, in Georgia, that depicts Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. One thing I didn’t know was that the person responsible for it also created Mount Rushmore—which, of course, features Abraham Lincoln. What’s the story there?

I really want Gutzon Borglum’s life to be, like, a Netflix miniseries.

Starting with the name.

So what we see today, carved into a mountain outside Georgia, was finished only in the mid-nineteen-seventies. But the project started in the nineteen-tens, when a Confederate widow called in a sculptor to carve a bust of Lee on the mountainside. And that sculptor was Gutzon Borglum, who was a rather strange choice. He was the son of Danish immigrants. He lived in Connecticut. He had made his name sculpting Lincoln, and in fact had named his son Lincoln, during a bid to be hired to make the Lincoln Memorial. He lost out to Daniel Chester French, and defected to the Confederate cause to make Stone Mountain.

And he upsold the widow rather dramatically. He said that a single bust of Lee would look as insignificant as a dime falling on a rug. Instead, he proposed more than seven hundred figures, all at least thirty-five feet tall, sweeping across the mountain. And he did so because he was in a lot of debt, and he’d get paid a percentage of the cost. So the bigger it was, the more it celebrated the Confederacy, the more money he would make.

What could go wrong?

The story of Stone Mountain has so many wild details. Borglum joined the newly revived Ku Klux Klan to solidify his ties to the patron of the project. He teamed up with Klansmen [who embezzled] donations intended for the sculpture. He was eventually fired, and the head of Lee that he carved on the mountain was blasted off. He almost went under from debt, but, just in time, he signed a contract to make what would become Mount Rushmore.

So I think that Stone Mountain is more a memorial to a con than to the Confederacy. It was in limbo for a long time, and it was only revived in the fifties, when Georgia’s anti-integration governor bought the property for a state park, hoping to make it a rallying point for resistance to integration. The Klan was revived there. Some people debate whether Lee, Jackson, and Davis should be represented, but I don’t really care. This history—the monument as a rallying point for anti-integration, as a birthplace of the Klan not once but twice—seems to me more important for making decisions about what its fate should be.

It’s kind of impossible to talk about Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore without talking about kitsch. Kitsch seems endemic to the whole form of monuments, maybe because art made for the purpose of veneration can’t admit irony, and I guess kitsch could be described as the ironic total lack of irony.

Are there any monuments you came across that you thought had aesthetic value?

I think monuments have the privilege of boredom. They are designed to give us a view of history and then discourage us from asking further questions. And so in one way they’re easily understood, and in another way they’re totally impenetrable, because you’re not meant to see any of the complexities. So they’re usually not that interesting aesthetically.

They can be very interesting when modified by artists today. But some of them are just not very good at all. In Tompkins Square Park, in New York City, there’s a monument to Samuel Cox, who voted against emancipation as a congressman. And even when the statue went up, in the late nineteenth century, the New York Times said that it was, aesthetically, not very good. It looks like three toddlers in a trenchcoat. But the statue received police protection in 2020.

So monuments get the privilege of preservation by being put in the category of art, and thus get to disseminate ideas even if we mostly all agree that those ideas no longer characterize the community. It doesn’t make sense to me that, just because it’s in bronze or marble, it gets to stay up as a loudspeaker.

Monuments obviously affect people who don’t want to see them. But then there are cases such as Dylann Roof, who visited Confederate landmarks before he committed his massacre, in 2015. It seems like these monuments still have a lot of power, even if for a lot of us they’re background noise. I wouldn’t know, walking through Tompkins Square Park, whom I was passing—I’d probably be looking for whomever I was going to meet. It’s interesting to see which monuments seem to lose their power, and then regain their power, depending on how much attention we’re paying to them at any given moment.

Yeah, monuments can reactivate. And that’s what gives you hope for the future. I think just making a monument vanish does nothing. But taking a monument down, or modifying it in a way that lets us talk about our future, how our community should change, can be incredibly powerful. So these monuments still have a role to play in the shaping of America—but toward equality, not oppression.

What are the most successful instances of what you mentioned before—contemporary artists working to modify or respond to monuments?

I wrote in the book about the Houston Museum of African American Culture, which took in a Confederate monument from a Houston park and had artists respond to it. Willow Curry made a really powerful video in which she’s directly addressing the sculpture, telling it that it can’t intimidate her and her fellow-citizens. That was very powerful.

There’s a sculpture outside the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, of a generic Indian on a horse. It isn’t meant to be derogatory, but it’s sort of insultingly nonspecific. The museum commissioned an Indigenous artist, who created a garden around the sculpture, including corn stalks that grew up and partially concealed it. I think it made people curious—why is there corn here, in front of the museum?—and encouraged them to think through what the sculpture was meant to do, what art is meant to do, in terms of representing America to itself.

And I think what we call graffiti on the monuments have been powerful reactions. There are plans under way to put the Jefferson Davis sculpture, from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, back on display, still coated in the pink paint that was thrown on it. That’ll be a reminder of this period of public debate.

Monuments can often seem to be an immovable part of our landscape. Where did you grow up?

Were there any monuments there that were a significant visual presence in your childhood?

Every day on my way to school, we would drive past a Mexican restaurant with a life-size sculpture of a bull and a bullfighter in front of it, in the parking lot. The bull was very anatomically correct, and college students would frequently paint the testicles in different colors, and then the restaurant would have to repaint them black. I was going to this private religious school where life was very restricted, where questioning authority was very much not allowed. And this act of playful vandalism was so encouraging to me as a sign that you could, in fact, question authority—you could make a change in the landscape.

Well, this brings us back to kitsch. A lot of monuments really are funny. I’m thinking of the monument you describe, completed in 1841, of George Washington , by the sculptor Horatio Greenough. Washington is seated, and his head is very clearly the head of George Washington, but he’s in a sort of Zeus pose, with one arm raised, his fingers pointing to the sky, and he’s naked from the waist up, with a torso that is chiselled both literally and figuratively. I think even at the time people thought this was a joke, right?

Yeah. I love how his jowls morph into pecs in this completely unrealistic way. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Well, some people did, but it did not translate well to the public. Which I think is a problem with monuments in general, right? It is difficult to represent the intellectual achievements of someone. Throughout history, intellect, power, or qualities of leadership have just been translated into physical perfection. So you get superhero George Washington instead of an actual portrait.

This sculpture was very interesting to me because it was commissioned for the rotunda of the Capitol, but got kicked out after only a few years. And, when I started writing the book, I thought that there hadn’t been that many removals of public art. In fact, there have been plenty of removals, so long as the art was seen as insulting by people in power. So if congressmen are saying, “We feel like only superheroes can become President if you have this sculpture of the chiselled George Washington in our midst, we don’t like that,” it’s going to go pretty quickly.

It seems to me that we’ve started to move away from figurative monuments. Maya Lin really brought us there with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial , and I’m also thinking of the reflecting pools at the World Trade Center. Is there something useful about the nonfigurative—that it doesn’t put all this weight on the body to represent universal human experience?

It really depends on whom you ask. Right now we’re arguing about what monuments should come down. We’re going to have even bigger arguments when we start to talk about what should replace them.

Very often, people in the art world will propose nonfigurative monuments, because they think those can evoke emotions without running into the problems of discriminatory representation. But, almost always, community groups want a figural monument to commemorate someone who is more important to that community. And this leads to a lot of disputes. Zachary Small in the New York Times wrote an article about a lawsuit over an abolitionist monument in Brooklyn. Essentially, the community group was, like, “Wait, you want this to be nonfigural? No, we are suing to prevent that.” So there’s going to need to be a lot of discussion, which is not what usually happens. Usually, monuments get air-dropped into a community by an arts authority or a funder without any discussion. If I were czar of monuments, they would all be nonfigural. But I am not, fortunately—too many headaches.

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How Monuments Help Us Remember—Or Not Remember—the Past

Andrew shanken on the origins and meanings of central park’s memorials.

Memorials are a tired topic, “dead,” a well-intentioned colleague told me in 2006, a Freudian slip of a word to use for objects or sites that so often bring the living into contact with the dead. I would be better off with a different research topic, she thought.

On the surface, she was right. Scholarship on memorials is a crowded field. With new titles published every year, it has become increasingly difficult to gain a meaningful purchase on the topic. Even the wider public could be excused for tiring of the latest round of memorial proposals. A pandemic memorial, anyone?  The Atlantic Monthly  is already there, as is  Forbes , NBC News, and NPR. Apparently, anticipating memorials is clickbait.

Indeed, we hear quite a lot about those honorific structures, statues, sculptures, plaques, and other objects that serve as memorials, an oddity for a period so willing to forget. Memorials are also commonly encountered as sites of political contestation, places where people go to raise awareness—or to raise hell. The Robert E. Lee equestrian statue in Richmond is a terrific example of the first, while the Lee equestrian statue in Charlottesville is a sad reminder of the second. Both are now gone.  Damnatio memoriae  can backfire and become an  aide memoire .

While memorials are well understood in these two roles—as commemorative and political devices—most of the time they are neither. Most often they are just there, in the way, turned off, or enveloped by the quotidian. Birds rest on generals’ heads. Teens cavort on their steps. Rush hour commuters race around them like any obstacle separating them from their appointments.

Frank O’Hara’s poem “Music” (1954) bares this reality: “If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian / pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe, / that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s / and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.” It is neither the anonymous equestrian, nor the surging angel that sets the narrator’s nerves atwitter. These remain generic, deprived of proper name, in spite of the fame of both subject (General Sherman) and sculptor (Augustus Saint Gaudens). But the Mayflower Shoppe and Bergdorf’s! These O’Hara names. It is the urban scene that grabs him; the memorial is foil. It is a scene, moreover, of bathos born of contrast, of solemn high culture brought low (and adoringly so) by commerce, while the narrator eats the most common of fast foods at the feet of an eternal golden angel.

What city dwellers have not, amid the bustle of urban life, plopped down at a memorial and not bothered to query its identity? Or worse, read the inscription with only dim recognition of the person’s identity or event’s meaning? We are no guiltier of amnesia than those who first erected modern memorials in great numbers in the late 19th century. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, one of the most astute architectural critics of the period, wrote: “If a work of art is agreeable to look upon, we may be glad to possess it even if it commemorates a well-meaning nobody.” She grouped Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman with the American panther in Central Park and, more surprisingly, the monuments at Gettysburg. They belonged together because they were all, in essence, public art. So much for sacred memory or politics.

Art, however, is no less fraught. On aesthetic grounds, memorials met with savage criticism from the moment they began to embellish modern cities. In the mid-19th century Thomas Carlyle called the new population of statues “poor wretches, gradually rusting in the sooty rain; black and dismal.” They “sanction and consecrate artistic botching” and “pretentious futility… No soul looks upon them… without damage, all the deadlier the less he knows of it.” This attitude extended to their sites. What Van Resselaer called “right placing” was a purely aesthetic matter: “A beautiful statue may be shorn of half its effect if badly stationed.” To some critics, places needed protection from memorials. Edgar Degas proposed walling off parks to defend them against the incursion of monuments.

This is one reason why Sherman is poised at the edge of Central Park, rather than being led through it. Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the originators of Central Park, plumped for parks entirely free of memorials. These detracted, he believed, from the pure encounter with nature. He rejected monuments and other intrusions on the natural aspect of his parks, which he called “townlike things.”

The artfulness of the first parks—their pretense of imitating unadulterated nature—attempted to counter the corrupt culture of the city with nature as a place ostensibly free of culture. Olmsted’s position was widely adopted, however ineffectually, across the United States. John McLaren, who served as the Superintendent for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for over fifty years, famously hid statues behind plantings. To this day, many of them can be seen fighting with foliage. As memorials invaded parks, they populated a landscape intended explicitly as an escape from those associations conjured up by memorials.

Olmsted and his followers obviously fought a losing battle. Memorials are fixtures in parks. They failed to concede to the reality that parks immediately came under immense pressure to serve many purposes. There were precious few civic spaces to absorb the increasingly complex needs of modern urban life. Olmsted’s insistence on unadulterated landscape met great resistance, not least of all from pragmatic reformers who saw the park as open land that could be put to use as a place of “cultural enlightenment,” where they could inculcate values to the masses. Olmsted’s purism surrendered to “museums and conservatories, aquariums, observatories, and zoos,” and other institutions. Playgrounds and monuments further broadened the urban park’s use and meaning.

Central Park bears the marks of these debates. Statuary lines the Mall. Again, Van Renssalear tells us why: “It should be remembered…, as a monument is a palpably artificial thing, the best place for it is where other artificial objects are conspicuous.” She thus supported the Mall in Central Park as a place for monuments because its formality openly acknowledged its artifice, whereas those parts of the park that pretended to naturalness were unsuitable. A bronze faun or a statue of Pomona could appearance in a glade or an orchard, but where parks looked natural, memorials were undesirable.

This explains why so many memorials were pushed to the edge of the park. The Columbus monument stands (for the time being) at the southwest corner, a pendant to Sherman. Other memorials line the edge, in the view of landscape architect George Burnap, turning them into a screen of the park and preventing them from becoming the dominant note. Sherman is a quintessential example and it set a pattern.

The 107th United States Infantry memorial (1927) on the eastern side of the park exemplifies this approach. An ensemble of World War I soldiers advance from the wooded thicket bordering Central Park, as if mounting a charge. The vignette is acutely cut off by Fifth Avenue. Three traffic lights and multiple lanes of traffic thwart their charge down 67th Street. Apparently, the anomalous collision of war and city was less upsetting than a memorial in the park. Behind the soldiers lies a playground, its slides, rocks, and water elements, all obscured from the memorial by the low wall of Central Park, a green buffer between the park and the urban wall of buildings, a curtain to help visitors suspend disbelief.

In  The Everyday Life of Memorials , I write about these boundaries, the way people frequently disregard them, the meaning of where we put memorials, and what we do at them. O’Hara had it right: The liver-sausage sandwich means nothing without Sherman, which is incoherent without Central Park or Bergdorf’s or the teaming masses gawking, flirting, littering, and now texting as they move through the scene. They’re all part of the total meaning of this urban fragment, which flows into other cultural landscapes that give it meaning. Sherman and his golden angel epitomize the formal. Placed by elites and official committees in a formally landscaped entrance to Central Park, they play the didactic role of keepers of memory, arbiters of culture, reminders of American hierarchies. They are symbols of authority, stand-ins for the powers that placed them there.

Yet all of this breaks down in O’Hara’s poem—and in real life. The everyday is not just the spaces in between and the neglected buildings, people, and processes in them, but the entire mixed-up scene. It turns out that the formal ain’t so formal, and the everyday is constantly under pressure to straighten up and tuck in its shirt. The formal Sherman and its formal setting, planned from above and gilded with high-minded allegory, are part of everyday urbanism.

As the geographer Richard Walker has written, largely to prod devotees of the everyday out of their purism: “The city and its monuments are an unending procession of spectacle, high drama, low farce, and play of representations upon the rude stones—fraud on the grandest scale—from classical Athens to Islamic Cairo or from Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s Paris to Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles.”

__________________________________

The Everyday Life of Memorials by Andrew Shanken is available from Zone Books. 

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History of Now

Scholars Spent a Year Scrutinizing America’s Monuments. Here’s What They Learned

A major audit of nearly 50,000 monuments reveals the historical figures, themes and myths that dominate the nation’s commemorative landscape

Nora McGreevy

Correspondent

Last summer, statues were seemingly coming down left and right. After the police murder of George Floyd sparked widespreads protests against racial injustice and police brutality , communities across the United States rallied to reevaluate—and, often, remove —the racist, misleading art decorating their public spaces.

Some works were quietly disassembled by authorities with cranes and construction gear. Others were thrown into the sea or yanked from their pedestals by protesters. Since May 2020, the Toppled Monuments Archive has cataloged 84 such removals of “colonialist, imperialist, racist and sexist monuments” in North America; the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Whose Heritage? Project, meanwhile, states that a record-breaking 168 Confederate symbols—including statues, institution names and plaques—were taken down in 2020.

But what about the public works that remain? According to Monument Lab , an art history and social justice nonprofit based in Philadelphia, an estimated 99.4 percent of American monuments were not toppled or taken down in 2020 and 2021.

In other words, Monument Lab director Paul Farber tells Smithsonian magazine , “for every [removed] monument that’s in the spotlight, ... scores more are still there as the old, worn furniture of a city or town.” Unsurprisingly, the statues still standing overwhelmingly honor white, male historical figures.

To view the nation’s commemorative landscape from a bird’s eye perspective, Farber and colleagues Laurie Allen and Sue Mobley led a team of 30 researchers in a year-long project to catalog as many American monuments as possible.

As Zachary Small reports for the New York Times , the survey—published this week as a 42-page audit and an open-source, searchable database —is the first of its kind. Funded by the Mellon Foundation ’s $250 million Monuments Project , the analysis charts 48,178 statues, plaques, parks and obelisks across public spaces in every state and U.S. territory.

The researchers parsed data from 42 publicly available sources, including state, tribal and federal records; National Park Service databases; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum ’s Save Outdoor Sculpture! survey, which was conducted between 1990 and 1995 and, until now, constituted the nation’s largest source of monument-related data.

“We did a lot of streamlining of data, bringing in biographical information and really pulling things together from scattered, decentralized sources,” says Farber.

The resulting data set allows scholars to “lift up the hood on the mechanisms of memory,” he adds. “We want to understand what gets remembered and what gets forgotten.”

The team’s findings throw into sharp relief what many have long suspected to be the case: America’s monuments overwhelmingly honor white men.

Of the top 50 most-represented individuals, only 5 are Black or Indigenous: civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (4th); abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman (24th); Shawnee chief Tecumseh (25th), who led Native American resistance to colonialism; Lemhi Shoshone explorer Sacagawea (28th); and abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass (29th). (No U.S.-born Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander or self-identified LGBTQ people appear in the top 50, per the audit.)

Half of the top 50 were enslavers, among them many U.S. presidents. Abraham Lincoln came in first place, appearing 193 times in the sample (a testament to his enduring popularity in the 20th century). He was followed closely by George Washington (2nd) and Christopher Columbus (3rd).

“The audit shows just how many Americans don't see themselves reflected in public art,” Erin Thompson, a historian at John Jay College, CUNY, and author of a forthcoming book titled Smashing Statues , tells National Geographic ’s Andrew Lawler. “Monuments are supposed to inspire us all, so what does it mean when our monuments make it seem like only wealthy white men are deserving of honor?”

Monument Lab’s top 50 includes just three women: Joan of Arc (18th), Tubman and Sacagawea. Outside of the top 50, the most frequently honored women are often European (such as scientist Marie Curie), saints (such as Catholic leader Elizabeth Ann Seton) or both (Joan of Arc).

Likenesses of female figures often represent mythological or allegorical symbols rather than actual people. This pattern made headlines in August 2020, when a statue of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first work to depict real women in New York City’s Central Park in its 167-year-history. (Previously, the park’s only statues of women portrayed fictional figures such as Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland.) As the audit wryly adds, the survey found that the ratio of statues depicting mermaids to those of U.S. congresswomen is 22 mermaids to 2 lawmakers.

Acts of violence figure heavily in the nation’s monuments. Thirty-three percent of the studied works commemorate war. Comparatively, just a sliver—9 percent—reference veterans.

“[O]ur monuments generally minimize the social and environmental costs of warfare for our veterans, their families and our communities,” the audit’s authors write.

Crucially, the myth of the “ Lost Cause ” pervades the monument landscape. (Touted by white supremacists, this ahistorical ideology suggests the Civil War was fought over states’ rights rather than slavery.) Of the 5,917 recorded monuments that memorialize the Civil War, just one percent include the word “slavery.”

This trend is the direct result of coordinated campaigns by neo-Confederate groups to erect monuments to Confederate leaders during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the civil rights movement was gathering steam. Commemorative works commissioned by such organizations as the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid “homage to a slave-owning society and [served] as blunt assertions of dominance over” Black Americans, as Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler wrote for  Smithsonian  magazine  in 2018. 

Indigenous and Native American communities are also widely misrepresented in U.S. monuments. Of 916 works dedicated to “pioneers,” just 15 percent mention Native American communities in any capacity.

Viewed in the aggregate, these markers represent “gross distortions over time,” with certain historical events skewed in the service of white colonists, according to Farber.

The scale of historical misinformation and racist exclusion laid bare by the data may be overwhelming. But Farber argues that “America’s monuments have never been frozen in time, beyond contact or reproach.”

Early colonists demonstrated this on July 9, 1776, when they toppled a statue of England’s George III—the first such removal recorded in the young nation’s history. The spate of monument removals seen in the past year is nothing new.

On one of the final days of edits for the audit, Farber witnessed another monument’s removal up close. Page proofs in hand, he stood with a crowd of hundreds gathered to see an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee taken down in Richmond, Virginia.

City workers carefully lifted the 21-foot-tall statue off its pedestal and cut the Confederate general’s torso from his body. As crowds cheered, the crew loaded the disassembled sections onto truck beds before driving them to an undisclosed storage unit.

Farber celebrates changes such as these. But he’s also eagerly looking forward to the monuments that artists have yet to design and install.

As Farber noted in a recent conversation with Mellon Foundation director Elizabeth Alexander , the audit’s authors hope their research provides a tool for the next generation of scholars, artists and activists to create new public spaces and symbols of their own.

“We really want to see this country engage in a holistic reckoning, in big and small ways, with these monumental erasers and lies,” Farber tells  Smithsonian . “We want to see a landscape that more fully acknowledges the history of this country.”

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Nora McGreevy is a former daily correspondent for Smithsonian . She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in Wired , Washingtonian , the Boston Globe , South Bend Tribune , the New York Times and more.

What I Learned from Visiting a Historical Site: An Undergraduate’s Experience at Gettysburg

Ryan Baldwin | May 17, 2016

A recent report from Humanities Indicators , a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, showed that less than a quarter of Americans aged 18 years or older visited a historical park or monument in 2012—a 13 percentage point drop from 1982. As a student from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, I traveled to Washington, DC, in January to intern with the American Historical Association for the spring semester. Having taken advantage of opportunities to explore the city’s many historic sites and museums, the report made me wonder about the nation’s declining interest in visiting historical sites. This in turn led me to ask the following question: Why should one visit a national historic site, and what can one learn from visiting them?

Standing on Little Round Top, students examined the rocky terrain and the view from the hill in order to better understand battle tactics. Credit: Ryan Baldwin

It was with these questions in mind that I, along with 30 other interns from BYU, traveled to the Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania to visit the historic site of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). The battle, one of the bloodiest during the American Civil War, is remembered for the Union’s decisive victory over Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee. The three-day battle ended with close to 52,000 casualties and inspired President Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address four months later.

Managed by the National Park Service, the Gettysburg National Military Park includes a Museum and Visitor Center that allows visitors to watch a film on the Civil War as well as view exhibits and archives related to the battle. While at the museum, we saw the famous Gettysburg Cyclorama—a 42-foot-tall, 377-foot-wide painting that depicts the third and final day of the battle. Our visit also consisted of a guided tour of the historic Gettysburg battlefield. We climbed Little Round Top—a small rocky hill that played a crucial role in the battle—and stood where Union soldiers must have as they watched the Confederate infantry emerge from the trees on the last day of the battle (Pickett’s Charge). We also visited the Gettysburg National Cemetery, which serves as the final resting place for over 3,500 Union soldiers and where President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

As we toured the battlefield, I realized that visiting historical sites can not only enrich our understanding of a particular historical event, but it can also allow us to engage with history in a way that provides greater local contextualization and a visceral connection to the people who lived through it. In fact, visiting the military park brought the Battle of Gettysburg alive to me in a way that no textbook had been able to until that point. Seeing the collections and reading archival sources such as journal entries and letters available at the museum allowed me to not only imagine life during the Civil War, but also to reflect on the struggles and experiences of soldiers who fought in the war.

A map of Union and Confederate forces on the day of Pickett’s Charge. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, visiting the actual location helped me better understand the logic and tactics deployed by both sides during the battle, and to come to terms with the immense loss of life that had occurred there. It is hard to visit a site as historic and significant as Gettysburg and not feel a connection to the men and women of the past, as well as to develop a deeper appreciation of the significance of the battle and the Civil War to American history and identity.

Visiting the Gettysburg battlefield and seeing the actual geography and landscape of the area, for example, gave me an insight into how historians analyze military tactics. As we stood gazing at Seminary Ridge from the Union center, we could better visualize Pickett’s Charge. Recalling the sources we had read at the museum, my cohort and I discussed the tactics of General Lee’s plan. Students stood on the higher ground and pointed to the open field—a little over three-quarters of a mile long—claiming that the plan was foolish from the start. Others noted how the distance of both Union flanks from their location stretched for a mile in both directions, and commented on the difficulty of moving Union troops and artillery to the center in a short amount of time due to the hills, trees, and other obstacles on either side of their position.

While standing on Little Round Top, students could also see the battlefield for miles, which helped us understand why Union Brigadier General Gouverneur Warren rushed to arrange a defense on the hill during the second day of the battle, an action that heavily contributed to the Union victory. While students often read how Little Round Top was a strategic position due to the high ground, it is difficult to see just how advantageous this spot was without seeing the rocky terrain and the view from the hill firsthand. Seeing and walking the landscape of Gettysburg helped students, including myself, to better understand the battle.

Our final stop for the trip was the National Cemetery where President Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address. While we stood near the Gettysburg Address Memorial, one of our classmates stood and read the famous speech. At the end of a long day, after having spent so much time reading various sources and seeing the battlefield firsthand, visiting the cemetery allowed for a quiet moment of reflection on the battle, its causes, and its consequences. While I’ve read the Gettysburg Address multiple times throughout my education, this speech never meant more to me than at that moment when I stood at the National Cemetery and pondered at the number of lives lost during the battle.

Regardless of our fields of study or interests, visiting historical sites can lead to a deeper engagement with historical events and give us an opportunity to develop a fuller appreciation for those who lived before us. When taken seriously, these experiences can be invaluable.

Ryan Baldwin is a senior studying history with a minor in classics at Brigham Young University. He was the publications intern for the American Historical Association for the spring 2016 semester.

This post first appeared on AHA Today .

Tags: AHA Today Resources for Undergraduates Military History Public History

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Essay on “Historical Monuments of India” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Historical monuments of india.

Essay No. 01

Indian History is full of the rise and fall of many kingdoms and empires. Monuments, built y the kings and they perform of every period throw light on the past history of India. these monuments exhibit the glory of India and are part of our cultural heritage. Almost all states of India boast of some or the other important historical monuments. Thousands of tourists visit India to have a glimpse of its important historical places.

Taj Mahal is one of the most famous and beautiful buildings of the world. Taj Mahal was build by Emperor Shah Jahan as the tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal. It matchless beauty draws visitors from all parts of the world. The taj mahal got the highest ranking among the Seven Wonders of the World after the biggest online poll at www.new7wonders.com . Part forms Taj Mahal there are other historical monuments in Agra.

Red fort is one of those monuments which enhance the grace of Delhi. Red fort was also built by shah Jahan the Mughal emperor. The architecture of this building has a splendid impact of red stone and marble works. it has delicate carving on every possible surface.

Qutub Miner’s also a significant historical monument. The construction of Qutub Minar was started by Qutub-ud-din Aibek in twelfth century. But it was completed by his successor Iltutmnish. the Minar rises over 230 feet. The walls of the Minar are intricately carved and inscribed with verses from the Holly Quram. It is often viewed as a symbol of the military might of the Turko Afghan dynasty. Delhi also boasts of historical monument like Purana Qila, humayun’s tomb Jantar Mantar and many more.

Hyderabad is famous for its charming minarets Charminar. The city is often identified with the majestic Charminaar which stands at the center of the old city. It was built by Muhammad quil Shah. Charminar with its enormous size and majestic splendor attracts a number of visitors. Hyderabad has many other famous monuments like Golkunda Fort, Purani Haveli Tombs of Qutub Shahi kings etc.

There are a number of such monuments that are not only historically famous but also have religious significance. Puri is well known for a twelfth century temple called Jagannath erected in honour of the Hindu god Vishnu. It begun by king chodagangaeva and completed by king Ananga Bhima Deva iii. it is very vast temple.

Golden Temple of Amritsar is also known as Darbar Sahib. It is a great pilgrimage center of the Sikhs. The holy temple was completed under the direct control and supervision of Guru Arjan Dev. It’s foundation stone was laid by a renowned Muslim divine Main Mir. The Guru intended to keep the temple open to people of all castes creeds and faith a. so it was given four door women each direction. it has a lire pool around it. During Maharaja Ranjit Singh reign the lower half of the temple was decorated with marble while the entire upper half was in laid with copper converted over by gold plate. Hence it is known as golden temple. Some other religious monuments are Badrinath temple, Dilwara temple Dakshineshwara temple,  Kailashnath temple ,Seven pagoda , Lotus temple Rameshwaram temple.

In British era too some important monuments were constructed. These monuments have their own important place in Indian history. India gate was constructed in the memory of those Indian soldiers who were killed in world war i. gateway of India was built to commemorate the visit of the first ever British Monarch King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. There are a number of other monuments built by the British. These are Rashtrapati Bhawan Parliament House Victoria Memorial.

Al these monuments are visited by millions of tourists actors the globe throughout the year. These monuments are among the best a in the world for their archaeological value design and historical significance but it is a disturbing fact that we have no looked after these monuments properly.

The majority of them are in a bad shape. Even the most famous monuments like Taj Mahal , Qutub Minar ,  Lal Qila have been belated. Nearby industrial areas and markets create pollution which is harmful for these monuments. The government must a take initiative to protect these monuments. Proper care of these monuments enhances their life. A committee of experts should be formed to study the present condition of the monuments and the steps needed to be taken to protect them. Proper attention and initiatives of the government can only save these historical monuments from ruining away.

Essay No. 02

The Taj Mahal, popularly considered as one of the wonders of the world, is a remarkable creation synthesized by the human virtues of artistry, endurance, aesthetics and the spirit of adventure; and inspired by the emotions of love and adoration. Situated on the banks of the river Yamuna, it was built by the seventeenth century Mughal Emperor, Shahjahan, in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz. The superior craftsmanship of its builders, and the high quality of the materials used to build it, ensure the building against possible ravages by the elements of Nature. The structure, as a whole, retains its luster and reflects its glory to the extent that, it continues to arouse awe and admiration in the numerous people who visit it round the year.

The greatness of the Taj Mahal is not confined to its fantastic beauty, both inside and outside. It is perhaps the only structure of its kind anywhere, in which marble as a building material has been used to create such marvellous effects. While the main ‘onion’ dome, minarets and the outer walls gleam in natural light, the deep-set doors called `aiwans’, and balconies get filled with faint reflected light, which creates an aura of mystery.

Though the. Taj Mahal is visited round the year, it may be seen in all its splendour on moon-lit nights, preferably in winter. It seems as though the charm and beauty of the building is enhanced several times by such a setting. In the rainy season, however, the marble turns to a hazy grey, giving the structure on the whole, a melancholy appearance.

Like any other object of beauty, the Taj Mahal also attracted attention ‘based on two different motives. If some saw it as a culmination of virtuous human endeavour, and, therefore, a source of inspiration, others considered it as a tempting target meant to be exploited. If those in the first category have raised the prestige of the Taj Mahal worldwide, those in the second have vandalized it and deprived it of much of its original beauty. The precious stones and other ornamentation that adorned the Taj Mahal, have from time to time been plundered by the various rulers and dynasties that followed the Mughals.

In modern times, however, the threat to the Taj Mahal is rather indirect. The focus on development in and around the city of Agra is a cause of serious atmospheric pollution in the region. As the main building material of the Taj Mahal is marble, such air pollution can at once cause the decline of its beauty and its physical destruction.

It is a matter of great relief that the people and the authorities have become aware of the modern threats to the Taj Mahal and have started adopting suitable measures to save the monument. It should be the fervent hope of all that the various salvaging ventures succeed. Such a success will ensure that the Taj Mahal as ‘a thing of beauty will remain a joy forever’!

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It is a nice essay .

Super essay

Hmmm…Yes

Waw| This Information Is Very Usefull For 10th and 12th class students. It will help to the students to understand about ancient and Medival history of India.Very effective Information.

This helps me a lot to understand the history of India n Taj Mahal

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History, Memory, and Monuments:   An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration

Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh

            “Monuments are good for nothing,” a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800.    In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition.   Reflecting on Congress’s reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observed   that “democracy has no monuments.”    “True memory,” many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people.

            Since those early days of the Republic, democracy has changed its tune.   Commemoration has become utterly commonplace, deeply rooted in the cultural practices of the nation.   Not only did Americans come to embrace traditional forms of commemoration, but they pioneered new practices, particularly in the remembrance of war dead.   Today American commemorative practices have multiplied and spread in ways no one could have imagined, extending now even into the solar system (with a monument to the fallen Columbia crew on Mars).

            While commemorative practices have been expanding for nearly two centuries, the academic literature on commemoration has mushroomed in the past twenty years.   So many scholars from such a variety of disciplines have joined the “memory boom” that mapping the field has become effectively impossible.   Moreover, scholars often talk at cross purposes with one another or simply in ignorance of each other’s work.   This essay, while by necessity impressionistic, will try to pinpoint key questions, debates, findings, and trends.

            The first key question might be, what is commemoration?   Dictionary definitions tell us that to commemorate is to “call to remembrance,” to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind.   Commemorations might be ephemeral or permanent ;   the key point is that they prod collective memory in some conspicuous way.

            French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ushered in the modern academic study of collective memory with his book The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925) in which he argued that all memory – even personal memory – is a social process, shaped by the various groups (family, religious, geographical, etc.)   to which individuals belong.   In an even more influential posthumous essay, “Historical Memory and Collective Memory” (1950), published after his death in a Nazi concentration camp, Halbwachs insisted on a distinction between history and collective memory: history aims for a universal, objective truth severed from the psychology of social groups while “every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.”   Thus our view of the past does not come primarily from professional historical scholarship but from a much more complicated and interwoven set of relationships to mass media, tourist sites, family tradition, and the spaces of our upbringing with all their regional, ethnic, and class diversity – to name just a few factors.   Just as personal memory is now understood to be a highly selective, adaptive process of reconstructing the past, shaped by present needs and contexts, so collective memory is a product of social groups and their ever evolving character and interests.   Hence the now commonplace notion that collective memory is “constructed,” amidst a perpetual political battleground.   Almost everyone now agrees with American historian Michael Kammen’s assertion, made in his magisterial volume Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind – manipulating the past in order to mold the present.”

            Yet even when collective memory is qualified in this way, many scholars remain skeptical of the notion.   In a 2001 essay on “ The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies” social historian Jay Winter asserted that we need “a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions about what exactly memory is, and what it has been in the past.”   Some scholars even question the existence of collective memory.   The very idea of collective memory seems to assume a unity of purpose – as if many different people somehow share a common mind – that belies the reality of even the smallest family group, let alone a diverse nation like the U.S.   James Wertsch has argued in Voices of Collective Remembering (2002) that collective memory is not a thing in itself but many different acts of remembering, shaped by overarching social forces and cognitive frameworks such as narrative. Susan Sontag in her final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) went even further and argued that there isn’t a collective memory at all but there is “collective instruction,” a complex process – left mostly unexplained in her book – by which certain ideas and images become more important than others.

            “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left,” French scholar Pierre Nora has famously argued ( Realms of Memory , orig. 1984).   Nora claimed that modern societies invest so heavily in “lieux de memoire” [memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and historic places] because these have replaced “real environments of memory,” the living memory that was once nourished spontaneously in premodern societies.   Nora’s claim echoes the anti-monument rhetoric of early American republicans.   Like the republicans before him, Nora suspected that modern commemorations were invented to make up for a lack of organic unity within modern nations and societies.   David Lowenthal’s book The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) made a similar point, arguing that modern societies try desperately to resurrect the past because it has already disappeared from living culture.   While this core insight has been productive – modernity does indeed disrupt old patterns of collective memory – it is also reductive, failing to take into account not only the importance of commemoration in premodern societies but also the persistence of the past and “spontaneous” practices of memory in modern societies such as the U.S.  

            Nora’s attention to sites of memory and the politics surrounding them has had a profound influence on American scholarship, but many scholars who cite him simply ignore or overlook the assumptions that underpin his work.   Whatever their theoretical allegiances, scholars keep circling around the same basic questions.   Who guides the process of remembering and towards what ends?   Why do specific commemorative projects take particular forms?   How do commemorative practices actually shape social relations and cultural beliefs (rather than simply reflecting them)?   Inevitably this last question raises the key issue of how conspicuous acts of commemoration like public ceremonies and monument building relate to the more everyday practices of schooling, reminiscing, and unconscious habit that carry knowledge and tradition from one generation to another.   This question is the least directly addressed issue, probably because it is the hardest to research, though it haunts much of the scholarship on memory.

            In the U.S. the “memory boom” seems to have been inspired largely by two phenomena: the coming to grips with the Holocaust, which began in earnest in the 1970s, and the unexpected success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982.   While the literature on Holocaust memory is now vast and intricate, James E. Young’s book The Texture of Memory (1993) has become indispensable.   Focusing on the unique problems posed by the trauma of the Holocaust, Young surveyed a range of memorial solutions in Europe and the U.S. from traditional heroic figurative monuments to avant-garde installations that deliberately undermined the very premise that monuments are permanent.   Throughout the book Young argued that monument building is a living process, in some sense always unfinished; no matter how much a monument may pretend to be eternal and unchanging, its meaning always evolves as its viewers bring new concerns and understandings to it.    Since the Holocaust was so clearly an event to be pondered rather than celebrated, monuments could never hope to fix its meaning for all time.

            The phenomenal power and popularity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost immediately revived scholarly interest in the subject of public monuments.   Traditionally, public monuments had been the most prestigious forms of commemoration because they were designed as permanent showcases of public memory, to last for the ages.   But in the twentieth century, scholars came to consider the public monument a dead form.   Lewis Mumford wrote in The Culture of Cities (1938) that “the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms.”   While public monuments did continue to be erected in the mid-20 th century, scholars paid little attention until Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial offered a new, distinctly contemporary memorial format, an open solution – to follow James Young’s suggestion – that deliberately encouraged multiple meanings and uses. This spawned an immense literature on the monument itself and a renewed interest in how monuments and other public practices of commemoration work in modern society.

            Fittingly, one of the most frequently cited books on American public memory, John Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (1992), began with a discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.   Bodnar, an eminent social historian of ethnic and immigrant communities, was dissatisfied with the all too frequent assumption that commemorations were top-down affairs imposed by ruling elites on a passive populace.   The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrated to him that commemoration interwove what he called “official” and “vernacular” memory, official memory driven by the need of the state to mythologize itself and maintain the loyalty of its citizens and vernacular memory driven by the need of ordinary people to pursue their social and political concerns in their local communities.   Surveying a broad range of local commemorations including monuments and anniversaries, Bodnar argued that national patriotism worked to “mediate” or reconcile the competing interests of official and vernacular memories.   While Bodnar’s distinction between official and vernacular can break down in practice, his book has helped establish that commemoration “involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments.”

            An interesting example that complicates Bodnar’s framework is Melissa Dabakis’s book, Monuments Of Manliness : Visualizing Labor In American Sculpture, 1880-1935 (1998), which studied various intersections of class, gender, and politics in the generally elite form of monumental sculpture.   Her investigation of the competing monuments to the Haymarket protest in Chicago in 1886 – one to the police, one to the anarchists – demonstrated that the “struggle for supremacy” was not only a conflict over which version of events would become officially enshrined in public space but also a shifting political conflict between left-wing and right-wing groups.   Ironically the official police monument had a more “realistic” vernacular form and definite vernacular appeal, at least among police recruits, while the anarchist monument had a more elite form laden with art-historical associations.

            Art historians like Dabakis, trained to study both the patronage and the reception of works of art, have realized for decades that monumental works become especially contested arenas, precisely because the work has a high public profile.   One of the earliest and best studies of U.S. monuments was Michele Bogart’s Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989).   Bogart’s book centered on the golden age of the public monument, a time when sculptural monuments proliferated not only in New York but throughout cities across the continent.    Her book traced the rise of an unabashedly elite genre of edifying commemoration at the end of the nineteenth century, supplied by well-known artists and their powerful political patrons.   But the story concluded with a fascinating account of how this elite consensus unraveled in the early twentieth century, as various groups – such as newly enfranchised women – began to acquire a voice in the process and to challenge the dominant sculptural language.   Since then that story has been extended by scholars such as Andrew Shanken, whose 2002 essay in Art Bulletin focused on the mid-twentieth century movement to replace sculptural monuments with “living memorials” (utilitarian memorials such as highways, parks, and concert halls).    Throughout the twentieth century memorials increasingly transformed from mere sculptural objects into more complex spaces, often with museum or archival functions.   Benjamin Hufbauer’s book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2005) has shown how gargantuan Presidential libraries have become a dominant type, overshadowing or even supplanting the older hero-on-a-pedestal that had once been the preferred type of monument to a great leader.

              As noted above, however, traditional public monuments never disappeared, and they continued to be a powerful form of commemoration even as they lost their appeal to cultural elites.   Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall’s Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (1991) is a study of one such monument, the Marine Corps War Memorial erected in Arlington, Virginia in 1954.   Their book embedded the monument within popular culture, where the iconic image originally came from (a wartime newspaper photo) and where it continues to live and thrive.   The phenomenon in which particular monuments have become icons of the nation has been studied in books such as Marvin Trachtenberg’s Statue of Liberty (1976), Rex Alan Smith’s Carving of Mount Rushmore (1985), Christopher A. Thomas’s The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (2002), and most recently Nicolaus Mills’s Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial (2004).   Albert Boime in The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (1998) demonstrated the authoritarian and exclusionary character of many of these icons, although he did not fully take into account what Bodnar might call the vernacular attachment to iconic forms of commemorative art.

            Washington, D.C. has received a great deal of attention because it is the commemorative heart of the nation.   The role of the Capitol building in commemorating the western expansion of the nation, and the defeat of Indians who stood in the way, has been examined in Vivien Fryd, Art And Empire : The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992).   Other aspects of the Capitol’s commemorative program have been explored in American Pantheon : Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol , a collection of essays edited By Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma (2004).   The development of the “monumental core” of the capital city has been much studied, but the single best volume on the national Mall as a commemorative landscape remains The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991 , edited by Richard Longstreth (1991).    Countless specialized studies on commemorative practices in the capital have been produced – on parades, ceremonies, cemeteries, city plans, outdoor sculpture – but surprisingly few serious synthetic studies of how the city has worked as a commemorative landscape.  

            More scholarly work in this direction is likely as the collective memory field continues to expand beyond its traditional base in sociology, history, and art history and embraces the work of geographers, landscape historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and other academic practitioners. Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s enthnographic study of America’s most famous living museum, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997), is an excellent example, investigating how the historical lessons of this site are continuously reshaped or even ignored as they are put into practice by reenactors and consumed by tourists.    Much of the newer work is in essay form.   Geographer Derek Alderman, for example, has investigated the issue of commemorative street naming focusing on Martin Luther King, Jr., in a series of articles in professional geography journals.   Some recent work has been collected in anthologies, such as Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (2001), edited by archaeologist Paul A. Shackel; Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (2002), edited by Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell; and Places of Commemoration : Search for Identity and Landscape Design (2001), edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn.   What all this work tends to have in common is an effort to map individual commemorative sites within larger contexts of remembrance – landscapes, geographic and administrative units, and social networks created by tourism, professions, and other factors.

            This should remind us that commemoration entails not only building, naming, or shaping physical sites.   Commemoration as a practice also involves ritual acts in and occupations of public space as well as other kinds of performance and consumption that may leave no lasting trace on the landscape.   W. Lloyd Warner’s classic study The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959) was an early examination of the role of patriotic parades and other symbolic observances in civic life.   David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry : The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990) examined the craze for commemorative pageants in the beginning of the past century, but this phenomenon has a long history in the U.S.   David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes : The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) and Sarah J. Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2002) both showed that in the early national period, festivals and anniversaries helped overcome partisan and class divisions and cement a national identity.   In our own time, new electronic media have greatly expanded and altered the terrain of commemoration.   Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) has made a pioneering contribution in this area; her study examined commemoration across many different media, by charting the ways in which memories of the victims of national crises circulated throughout American culture in films, monuments, medical practices, and domestic grieving turned public.   Yet George Lipsitz’s Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990) has argued that even in age dominated by television and commercial culture, popular traditions of storytelling and festivity among disenfranchised groups, such as working-class blacks in New Orleans, have still played a part in upholding their own versions of the past.

            All these diverse commemorative practices come together most powerfully around the remembrance of war.   It is no surprise that much of the literature on commemoration in the U.S. deals with war and its aftermath.   G. Kurt Piehler’s Remembering War the American Way (1995) has remained a useful synthetic study, but the literature has grown to the point where synthesis now seems quixotic.   The memory of the Civil War has stood out as a particularly fertile topic.   In recent years a great deal of work has been done on memory and race, as scholars from numerous angles have shown how the commemoration of the Civil War helped to shape new racial relations within American society – removing African American soldiers from mainstream public memory, defeating the dream of racial equality, and advancing the cause of white supremacy.   David W. Blight’s ambitious synthesis Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has become the indispensable reference for this argument.   The book surveys an enormous range of commemorative practices from oratory to pageantry to monuments and beyond.   More specialized studies of the racial relations of war memory include Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape (2003), and Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom : Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (2003).   Recent studies have made ever more nuanced analyses that interweave the issue of race with gender, class, and region.   Exemplary collections along these lines include Where These Memories Grow : History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000), edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Monuments to the Lost Cause : Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003), edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson.

        In addition to reshaping racial relations and beliefs, the scale of the Civil War dramatically changed and expanded commemorative practices, creating a new cult of the veteran and new modes and technologies of remembering the war dead – innovations that preceded comparable developments in Europe by years or even decades.   For the first time, photographers shot images of battlefield corpses, a profound shift in the understanding and memorialization of warfare analyzed in studies such as Timothy Sweet, Traces of War : Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (1990) and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs : Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).   The emergence of veterans organizations and their role in promoting the memory of the common soldier have been explored in Stuart McConnell’s Glorious Contentment : the Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (1992) and in Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary’s To Die For : The Paradox of American Patriotism (1999).    Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves has examined the resulting democratization of war memorials, and the phenomenal spread of a new type of ordinary-soldier monument.   Another innovation, the creation of national soldier cemeteries such as Gettysburg, was briefly examined as a precedent for twentieth-century European practices by historian George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990).   Since then this line of research has been extended by others such as Susan-Mary Grant in a series of essays, most recently in the journal Nations and Nationalism (2005).

            Battlefields too have been witness to dramatically changing patterns of commemoration, and thus have posed intricate problems for their stewards, most notably the National Park Service.   Edward T. Linenthal in Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (1991) examined the ways in which battlefields from the Revolution to WWII have been transformed into “sacred” landscapes which various groups fight to protect from political or racial or commercial defilement.   Any commemorative narratives that stray from the narrowly defined script of military heroism become suspect.   For instance the National Park Service’s efforts to expand the historical significance of Civil War battlefields beyond military history into social and political issues such as slavery have encountered resistance both inside and outside the agency, as Paul Shackel has shown in his case study of Manassas ( Memory in Black and White ).   More recently Jim Weeks in Gettysburg : Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (2003) has called into question the notion of the sacred by arguing that tourism and the marketplace have profoundly shaped even the most revered battlefield from its very inception.   He has shown that, as cultural norms have changed, the standards of appropriate commemorative behaviors have also changed – sometimes in surprising ways.   For example, battle reenactments originated as commercial entertainments that elites discouraged as frivolous, but in the past two decades have grown into a wildly popular participatory sport, with ever more stringent standards of authenticity.   Ironically, the hundreds of regimental and officer monuments that were once the heart of the commemorative landscape have now become intrusions into the “authentic” experience of the past!

            Besides battlefield reenactments, another major new participatory phenomenon of memorialization is the spontaneous offering of personal mementos at national memorials, which began in the early 1980s at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.   Kristin Ann Hass has examined the roots and meanings of this phenomenon in Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1998).   At the same time recovery efforts and reverence for the bodies of the war dead have reached new extremes of emotional and financial cost, as Thomas M. Hawley has recently investigated in The Remains of War : Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (2005).   All of these developments indicate an extension and transformation of the popular sphere of memory practices of the late nineteenth century.   Ordinary citizens increasingly have become the subject and the actor in commemorative initiatives, even as the power and cost of the “military-industrial complex” have grown mightily.

            In recent times the remembrance of war has become connected almost inextricably with the issue of trauma.   Once again the Holocaust and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have served as the key landmarks in this process.   Young’s Texture of Memory and Sturken’s Tangled Memories have shed light on the new importance of victimization within commemorative practices.   Geographer Kenneth E. Foote’s study Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (1997) examined how Americans have dealt with landscapes marked by war, mass murder, and other traumatic events.   In a related development, the remembering and forgetting of Indian removal, confinement, and extermination have become increasingly important subjects in studies of national historic sites such as Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999) by Mark David Spence,   and The Politics of Hallowed Ground : Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1999) by Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.   Edward Linenthal has created the most extensive body of work on trauma and commemoration, in a series of meticulously researched books on subjects spanning from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first: Sacred Ground , Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995), and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (2001).   Since 9-11, the subject has become even more important, and numerous scholars have already entered the field.   Two new examples include Savage’s study of the “therapeutic memorial” in an essay in the collection Terror, Culture, Politics:   Rethinking 9/11 , edited by Daniel Sherman and Terry Nardin (2006), and Terry Smith’s examination of the contemporary struggle over iconic architecture in Architecture of Aftermath (2006).

            While work on commemoration continues to multiply, and to examine ever more carefully how memory practices penetrate all facets of our collective life, much work remains to be done on the actual impact of all these practices.   Few scholars have attempted to theorize the relationship between commemoration and tradition, what we might call the exterior and interior faces of historical consciousness.   On the one hand are public sites and rituals of memory, and on the other hand are ingrained habits of thought and action that persist in individuals, families, and communities across long spans of time.     While few scholars would agree with Nora that interior memory has disappeared, most scholars have focused on the exterior struggles to construct memory in one form rather than another.   One of the only scholars to argue against this trend has been social scientist Barry Schwartz, who has written a series of articles and books on American Presidents in historical memory.   In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) Schwartz has argued that memory is not constructed anew in each new commemorative project; instead, he has asserted that in a democratic society historical facts have serious weight and help create “core elements” of memory that persist over long periods of time.   Yet his belief in an authentic “core” memory led him, ironically, to downplay certain historical facts, such as the outright fraud and hucksterism involved in “assembling” the log cabin in which Lincoln was supposedly born.   (For more on the log cabin story, see Dwight Pitcaithley’s meticulously researched essay in Shackel’s Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape .)   In fact, historical errors and deliberate distortions abound in the landscape of commemoration, as James W. Loewen’s amazing study, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), has so amply demonstrated.   But Schwartz’s point remains well taken: scholars must take into account not only the changing politics of commemoration but also the stubborn persistence of traditions and beliefs – some of which persist even when they conflict with historical fact or common sense.  

            This perspective might have helped scholars prepare better for the emotionally charged controversy over the Smithsonian’s ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit, which was intended to mark the 50 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by putting the event in historical context.   The controversy was a particularly dramatic example of how the work of historians, based on supposedly apolitical principles of evidence and analysis, came into conflict with powerful “memory constituencies,” whose long-cherished beliefs about the righteousness of the American military cemented their group identities as veterans and patriots.    Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt’s History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1998) untangled this controversy and showed how the partisan politics and “culture wars” of the time helped fuel it.   At the same time the book showed how the Enola Gay fiasco was not simply another episode in the “politics of commemoration.”   The controversy transcended the politics of the moment and became a classic confrontation between history and collective memory – anticipated in Halbwachs’ original distinction – where history inevitably loses precisely because it lacks the unshakeable beliefs of psychically invested constituencies.   Some of the contributors to History Wars asked whether the “patriotic” narratives of commemoration could be expanded and humanized to encompass the multiple realities of war, to bring the longstanding traditional stories of triumph into contact with more tragic stories of the human cost and moral ambiguity of warfare.   The question has no easy answer.

            One pioneering effort to integrate the various realms of internal and external memory, of invisible traditions and visible histories, is Martha Norkunas’s Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (2002).   Her book traced the changing relationship between the public, mostly masculine face of memory in Lowell – in honorific monuments and historical sites – and the largely oral traditions, passed on by women, that preserved the memory of those who kept the community intact and functioning outside the public eye.   While her study would benefit from more analysis of the interaction between these realms of memory, her book points in a useful direction.   Likewise, Bodnar’s distinction between vernacular and official memory remains intuitively useful, but needs further refinement, retesting, and revision in order to understand better how these realms of memory interpenetrate one another.   This might help explain, for example, the persistence and power of military commemoration.   How does the inner/vernacular memory of women, ethnic groups, and other ordinary Americans help support the outer/ official   memory of such a quintessentially top-down, masculine institution as the military? Pursuing questions like these would eventually help bridge the gap between the spectacular “politics of commemoration” and the more inconspicuous workings of tradition.   How the past is produced, consumed, internalized, and acted upon will no doubt remain a rich and complex problem for scholars as they work further to extend and integrate the approaches outlined in this essay.

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Why preserving historical places and sites matters.

Tom Mayes is the author of Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Our Identity and Wellbeing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Why do old places matter to people?  Why should old places matter to historians, or to the general public that historians serve? What can we learn from the continued existence of old places in our communities, and in our nation?  Why does it matter if we save these old places or if we don’t?

There are many reasons old places matter, from memory, to civic identity, to history, to architecture, to beauty, to economics.  While even the fourteen reasons I name in Why Old Places Matterdon’t fully capture all the many meanings old places have for people, for the readers of History News Network, I’d like to emphasize one main idea: old places give us an understanding of history that no other documents or evidence possibly can.  

At Civil War battlefields like Antietam, historians and visitors alike can understand how a slight rise in the lay of the land could mean victory or defeat, and how one division was lost, while another survived.  At artists’ homes and studios like Chesterwood, the home of Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the Seated Lincoln, we can understand how a certain quality of light, or a clear mountain view, or the ticking of a clock, may have inspired a painting, poem, or sculpture – and may inspire visitors today. 

At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, we can understand something profoundly visceral about cramped, dark, and crowded lives of emigrants in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

And at dirt-floored, often roughly-built slave dwellings, we can try to glean an inkling of the reality of human bondage that we cannot understand from documents alone.  We experience old places with all of our senses, like full body immersion, and because of that, we understand different aspects of history as it was lived.

This would be enough.  But I believe that these old places play a larger role.  The continued existence of these old places may foster a deeper understanding of history that tells a more full and true story. 

Yes, these places can be manipulated to spin a particular viewpoint, like the way, for many years, the reality of slavery wasn’t acknowledged at plantation houses, or Native American perspectives weren’t expressed at frontier forts, or the way countless workers were left out of the story altogether.  One reason people weren’t acknowledged is that their places were not often recognized, valued, and retained.  These are the places that were easy to erase – to pave over with interstates, sports stadiums, and urban renewal.  Many have literally been erased from our landscape and our memory.  

It’s easier to pretend that slavery was benevolent if the reality of the poor living conditions of slave dwellings isn’t confronting visitors.  Or that labor unrest didn’t happen if the places where it happened are bulldozed.  Erasure of places can serve to hide truths that can’t be hidden if the place survives.  The recognition of sites by the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund functions as an act of social justice.  As a descendant of the Chinese American builders of an 1850’s Taoist temple in Mendocino, California said to me, the fact that the place exists – a Taoist temple from the 1850s—announces to everyone that “we were here.”

If the place survives, it can also become the vortex and venue for understanding our changing civic and national identity.  The places we choose to save-or not-reflect our identity.  That’s why we see places that are important to the “enemy” being targeted in times of conflict, such as the Mostar Bridge.  The destruction of the old place is tantamount to the destruction of the group identity.  Old places may also be targeted precisely because they tell a deeper, older, and different story, such as the Bamiyan Buddhas, which were destroyed because they represented a different religion, or the archaeological sites of Babylon or Palmyra. 

I don’t want to suggest that we can understand everything about history simply by experiencing the old places where history happened.  In fact, I’d like to emphasize a completely different point.  These old places matter not only for what they can tell us, but precisely because they raise questions.  There are often things about an old building, or a battlefield, or a working landscape that will surprise or puzzle us.  It may only be a quirky door, or the etching of initials on glass, or an unexpected rise in an otherwise flat field, or an unusual place name.  

An old place continues to carry memories of other stories that we don’t necessarily understand today, like the way the bones of our ancestors continue to surface in our cities and towns where we thought there were no people buried, or the way a Hebrew letter on an ancient column reminds us that the Jews of Rome were not always forced to live in the ghetto.  

These puzzles upend what we thought we knew and help us remember that we can never know everything about the past.  These quirks at old places jab us to be less arrogant and remind us to be humble and open as we try to understand the past and what it means for us today.   

Old places matter because they give us a deeper understanding of the past – an understanding no other documents possibly can, while reminding us to be humble about what we know.  

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Why Visit Historical Places?

Having been a life-long lover of history, I used to be shocked when someone told me:

“I don’t like history.”

In my mind, they had just morphed into Cruella de Ville.

Who could not like history?!?

As it turns out…plenty of people. After teaching college-level history for many, many years, I’ve come across a plethora of students who don’t care for hearing about our past. I take them as a challenge. My job being to instill my passion for history in them and have them come to appreciate (if not adore) the past.

An easy way to do that is to get them out visiting historical sites. One of my projects for a Michigan history class affords students the chance to visit and analyze places where history occurred. As they travel around the state, they uncover the stories that historical places have to tell. An old lighthouse tells of the keeper who stayed vigilant throughout the night to keep sailors safe. A centennial office building showcases modern architectural techniques of the 1920s and famous Art Deco designs of the “Modern Era.” A church which served as a stop on the Underground Railroad speaks of the peril escaping slaves experienced and the bravery with which they sought freedom. And are there more tantalizing tales than those from Prohibition Era speakeasies? Through their historic site adventures, my students are able to unravel the past and learn how seemingly mundane places are woven into the fabric of history.

Why visit historical places?

• They connect us to the past. Through visiting these places where history occurred we find our roots. History allows us to feel like we are part of something much bigger. It humbles us while inexplicably making us feel stronger, because we come from a long line of survivors, and special, because we are part of this vast chain of humanity.
• They connect us to other cultures. By seeing places from the past in other areas, I am able to relate to those people. I can see similarities between their culture and mine, as well as differences. Both of which help me feel a deeper understanding of others.
• They help us realize we aren’t alone with our situations. Throughout time immemorial, people have grappled with the same issues. A church in Italy may look different than a church in Michigan, but they express the same purpose of uniting people who are looking for a place to express their faith. I enjoy seeing the subtle variations in public buildings. In the States, our financial buildings often employ the same architectural styles as ancient Greek temples. I find the similarities between the New York Stock Exchange, US Supreme Court, and Athenian Parthenon fascinating (see below). The grandness of a building often indicates the importance it is given by a society.
• They tantalize us. Historical places let us be voyeurs into the past. They give us the chance to time travel and pull back the curtain on a different age.
• They allow us to fantasize. We can live like the rich and famous (until the palace closes for the day). Wander in the gardens of kings. Drink wine in a cafe where philosophers met. Pretend to hear the roar of the crowd at a gladiatorial game. Visiting a historic site is similar to another favorite pastime of mine…reading. It is escapism at its finest.

Like what you just read? You can support me by following my blog and leaving comments–I love to hear from my readers. Happy travels! Amy

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10 thoughts on “why visit historical places”.

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I absolutely like how you said that we discover our roots by traveling to these historical sites because history makes us feel that we are a part of something much larger. Because we come from a long line of survivors and are connected to a large chain of humanity, you also shared how it makes us feel unique while also humbling us. This is beautiful, really. And you know what… maybe I’ll go on a guided history tour with my boyfriend this month and see what we can both learn from it. I am so excited!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thank you! If you do go on a history sightseeing adventure, let me know where you went…I love seeing our shared past through other’s eyes. And if you need a recommendation for a guide, drop me a line and I’ll see if I know someone. Happy travels!

What. If I want to find the importance of studying historical places

For full context, you could research a place before you go, or taking a course on the subject (your local community college might have one), but many historical sites have experts on the site to help answer questions (or they provide information at the site or on their website).

Also, a tour with an expert guide is a great way to learn more.

I teach adult ESOL and found your article really helpful. We try to encourage parents to engage with their children in ways that provide learning opportunities for the whole family. Your article has inspired a lesson on discovering our community. The summary of reasons why we should visit historical places is perfect. I think I will even make a contest to see who can visit the most historical places between now and the end of the year!

That is wonderful! I assign a project for my college students where they visit historical sites…it is quite popular. Students love to travel around the state to see what they can uncover; many of them make it a family event and teach their children along the way. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for sharing, I discovered what brought me here and more

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• Explainer: The debate over the removal of historic monuments

What just happened?

Recent protests centered around racial injustice and the killing of African American, like George Floyd and many others, have led to a renewed debate over the meaning and significance of historical monuments. Over the past three weeks, over 100 monuments across the United States have been torn down or scheduled for removal. 

Which monuments are involved?

The removal efforts fall into two broad categories. The first category includes the use of legal and legislative means of removing statuary, and has focused primarily on Civil War-era figures (such as Confederate generals and the Emancipation Statue in Washington, D.C .) and Christopher Columbus (19 memorials to the Italian explorer have been removed so far). The second category includes the vandalism or use of illegal means to remove memorials, often done spontaneously as part of protests. The targets of these efforts have been more haphazard and include anti-slavery activists , feminist iconography , and Christian missionaries . 

Why are Confederate statues the primary focus?

In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That mass shooting sparked renewed efforts—both legal and illegal—to remove Confederate memorials around the country. For example, the New Orleans’s city council voted to remove the city’s four Confederate monuments , and in Durham, North Carolina, protestors smashed a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood outside the county’s courthouse.

These statues have mainly been focused upon because of their connection to white supremacy and racial injustice. The majority of Confederate monuments were erected in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), when many state laws began reestablishing racial segregation, and from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, during the peak of the civil rights movement. As David A. Graham says , “In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality.”

What prevents the illegal removal of monuments?

The Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003 , makes it a federal crime to willfully injure or destroy, or attempt to injure or destroy, any “structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States.” Similarly, vandalism and destruction of monuments on federal property is also already a federal crime . To enforce the laws, about 400 unarmed D.C. National Guardsmen were put on standby at the Washington, D.C. Armory to provide backup to National Park Police to help prevent damage at key monuments in the city. An email has also been sent to U.S. marshals notifying them that they should prepare to help protect national monuments. Marshals Service Assistant Director Andrew C. Smith wrote that the agency “has been asked to immediately prepare to provide federal law enforcement support to protect national monuments (throughout the country).”

Why do we not immediately remove all controversial monuments?

The process of removing public monuments is often hindered by legal restrictions. Public monuments are protected by an interlocking web of international-, federal-, and state-level law intended to protect cultural property. As E. Perot Bissell V notes in the Yale Law Journal , modern cultural-property law emerged in the wake of the destruction and looting that followed World War II. “Because cultural-property law’s original purpose was to address the potential for wartime destruction of the world’s Treasures,” says Bissell, “its organizing principle is the preservation of historically or aesthetically significant heritage.”

Since cultural-property law developed in response to widely deplored acts of destruction, it is focused on preservation of existing monuments. This can make it difficult to remove statues and memorials even when the society’s values have changed and the subject is no longer considered worthy of honor.

Take, for example, the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument, which was removed from a park in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2017. The monument to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan was protected by the 1954 Hague Convention, the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, and a state law forbidding the removal of any statue from state property. According to Bissell, “Memphis ultimately removed its Forrest Monument through a clever work-around, transferring the park in which it stood to a nonprofit.”

How should Christians think about the removal of monuments?

A useful starting point might be to consider the historical circumstances of the monument’s erection and determine whether the motivation or cause for remembrance is a value that a Christian would consider worthy of memorializing. 

For example, Confederate statues are obvious candidates for removal from public spaces, since their purpose is to venerate a cause that celebrated slavery, segregationism, and white supremacy. In contrast, monuments related to the Founding Fathers were not typically erected to remember their accomplishments as slave-holders, but for their more noble accomplishments. 

The context and location of the monument should also be given consideration. Christians might ask if this exact monument didn’t exist, how likely is it that we would support making a new monument to this person in this way at this location? For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently called for the removal of 11 Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol. Two of the statues include Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, the president and vice president of the Confederate States of America. Whatever else we might think about remembrances of the Confederacy, it seems unlikely that we’d choose today to honor traitors to our nation in the halls of our legislature. 

Monuments are more than mere historical reminders. They become part of our historical memory, showing what we think is worthy of being honored and revered. As we become more honest with ourselves as a nation about the darker areas of our history, we should consider what is worth celebrating.  As Christians, we are called to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31), which might require rethinking how we memorialize our past.

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Combatting confusion in society’s language about gender and sexuality

Receive your practical guide to answering gender confusion today in your inbox, sign up for your free reminder for bringing hope to an election year, article 12: the future of ai.

We affirm that AI will continue to be developed in ways that we cannot currently imagine or understand, including AI that will far surpass many human abilities. God alone has the power to create life, and no future advancements in AI will usurp Him as the Creator of life. The church has a unique role in proclaiming human dignity for all and calling for the humane use of AI in all aspects of society.

We deny that AI will make us more or less human, or that AI will ever obtain a coequal level of worth, dignity, or value to image-bearers. Future advancements in AI will not ultimately fulfill our longings for a perfect world. While we are not able to comprehend or know the future, we do not fear what is to come because we know that God is omniscient and that nothing we create will be able to thwart His redemptive plan for creation or to supplant humanity as His image-bearers.

Genesis 1; Isaiah 42:8; Romans 1:20-21; 5:2; Ephesians 1:4-6; 2 Timothy 1:7-9; Revelation 5:9-10

Article 11: Public Policy

We affirm that the fundamental purposes of government are to protect human beings from harm, punish those who do evil, uphold civil liberties, and to commend those who do good. The public has a role in shaping and crafting policies concerning the use of AI in society, and these decisions should not be left to those who develop these technologies or to governments to set norms.

We deny that AI should be used by governments, corporations, or any entity to infringe upon God-given human rights. AI, even in a highly advanced state, should never be delegated the governing authority that has been granted by an all-sovereign God to human beings alone. 

Romans 13:1-7; Acts 10:35; 1 Peter 2:13-14

Article 10: War

We affirm that the use of AI in warfare should be governed by love of neighbor and the principles of just war. The use of AI may mitigate the loss of human life, provide greater protection of non-combatants, and inform better policymaking. Any lethal action conducted or substantially enabled by AI must employ 5 human oversight or review. All defense-related AI applications, such as underlying data and decision-making processes, must be subject to continual review by legitimate authorities. When these systems are deployed, human agents bear full moral responsibility for any actions taken by the system.

We deny that human agency or moral culpability in war can be delegated to AI. No nation or group has the right to use AI to carry out genocide, terrorism, torture, or other war crimes.

Genesis 4:10; Isaiah 1:16-17; Psalm 37:28; Matthew 5:44; 22:37-39; Romans 13:4

Article 9: Security

We affirm that AI has legitimate applications in policing, intelligence, surveillance, investigation, and other uses supporting the government’s responsibility to respect human rights, to protect and preserve human life, and to pursue justice in a flourishing society.

We deny that AI should be employed for safety and security applications in ways that seek to dehumanize, depersonalize, or harm our fellow human beings. We condemn the use of AI to suppress free expression or other basic human rights granted by God to all human beings.

Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-14

Article 8: Data & Privacy

We affirm that privacy and personal property are intertwined individual rights and choices that should not be violated by governments, corporations, nation-states, and other groups, even in the pursuit of the common good. While God knows all things, it is neither wise nor obligatory to have every detail of one’s life open to society.

We deny the manipulative and coercive uses of data and AI in ways that are inconsistent with the love of God and love of neighbor. Data collection practices should conform to ethical guidelines that uphold the dignity of all people. We further deny that consent, even informed consent, although requisite, is the only necessary ethical standard for the collection, manipulation, or exploitation of personal data—individually or in the aggregate. AI should not be employed in ways that distort truth through the use of generative applications. Data should not be mishandled, misused, or abused for sinful purposes to reinforce bias, strengthen the powerful, or demean the weak.

Exodus 20:15, Psalm 147:5; Isaiah 40:13-14; Matthew 10:16 Galatians 6:2; Hebrews 4:12-13; 1 John 1:7 

Article 7: Work

We affirm that work is part of God’s plan for human beings participating in the cultivation and stewardship of creation. The divine pattern is one of labor and rest in healthy proportion to each other. Our view of work should not be confined to commercial activity; it must also include the many ways that human beings serve each other through their efforts. AI can be used in ways that aid our work or allow us to make fuller use of our gifts. The church has a Spirit-empowered responsibility to help care for those who lose jobs and to encourage individuals, communities, employers, and governments to find ways to invest in the development of human beings and continue making vocational contributions to our lives together.

We deny that human worth and dignity is reducible to an individual’s economic contributions to society alone. Humanity should not use AI and other technological innovations as a reason to move toward lives of pure leisure even if greater social wealth creates such possibilities.

Genesis 1:27; 2:5; 2:15; Isaiah 65:21-24; Romans 12:6-8; Ephesians 4:11-16

Article 6: Sexuality

We affirm the goodness of God’s design for human sexuality which prescribes the sexual union to be an exclusive relationship between a man and a woman in the lifelong covenant of marriage.

We deny that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a justification for the development or use of AI, and we condemn the objectification of humans that results from employing AI for sexual purposes. AI should not intrude upon or substitute for the biblical expression of sexuality between a husband and wife according to God’s design for human marriage.

Genesis 1:26-29; 2:18-25; Matthew 5:27-30; 1 Thess 4:3-4

Article 5: Bias

We affirm that, as a tool created by humans, AI will be inherently subject to bias and that these biases must be accounted for, minimized, or removed through continual human oversight and discretion. AI should be designed and used in such ways that treat all human beings as having equal worth and dignity. AI should be utilized as a tool to identify and eliminate bias inherent in human decision-making.

We deny that AI should be designed or used in ways that violate the fundamental principle of human dignity for all people. Neither should AI be used in ways that reinforce or further any ideology or agenda, seeking to subjugate human autonomy under the power of the state.

Micah 6:8; John 13:34; Galatians 3:28-29; 5:13-14; Philippians 2:3-4; Romans 12:10

Article 4: Medicine

We affirm that AI-related advances in medical technologies are expressions of God’s common grace through and for people created in His image and that these advances will increase our capacity to provide enhanced medical diagnostics and therapeutic interventions as we seek to care for all people. These advances should be guided by basic principles of medical ethics, including beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, which are all consistent with the biblical principle of loving our neighbor.

We deny that death and disease—effects of the Fall—can ultimately be eradicated apart from Jesus Christ. Utilitarian applications regarding healthcare distribution should not override the dignity of human life. Fur- 3 thermore, we reject the materialist and consequentialist worldview that understands medical applications of AI as a means of improving, changing, or completing human beings.

Matthew 5:45; John 11:25-26; 1 Corinthians 15:55-57; Galatians 6:2; Philippians 2:4

Article 3: Relationship of AI & Humanity

We affirm the use of AI to inform and aid human reasoning and moral decision-making because it is a tool that excels at processing data and making determinations, which often mimics or exceeds human ability. While AI excels in data-based computation, technology is incapable of possessing the capacity for moral agency or responsibility.

We deny that humans can or should cede our moral accountability or responsibilities to any form of AI that will ever be created. Only humanity will be judged by God on the basis of our actions and that of the tools we create. While technology can be created with a moral use in view, it is not a moral agent. Humans alone bear the responsibility for moral decision making.

Romans 2:6-8; Galatians 5:19-21; 2 Peter 1:5-8; 1 John 2:1

Article 2: AI as Technology

We affirm that the development of AI is a demonstration of the unique creative abilities of human beings. When AI is employed in accordance with God’s moral will, it is an example of man’s obedience to the divine command to steward creation and to honor Him. We believe in innovation for the glory of God, the sake of human flourishing, and the love of neighbor. While we acknowledge the reality of the Fall and its consequences on human nature and human innovation, technology can be used in society to uphold human dignity. As a part of our God-given creative nature, human beings should develop and harness technology in ways that lead to greater flourishing and the alleviation of human suffering.

We deny that the use of AI is morally neutral. It is not worthy of man’s hope, worship, or love. Since the Lord Jesus alone can atone for sin and reconcile humanity to its Creator, technology such as AI cannot fulfill humanity’s ultimate needs. We further deny the goodness and benefit of any application of AI that devalues or degrades the dignity and worth of another human being. 

Genesis 2:25; Exodus 20:3; 31:1-11; Proverbs 16:4; Matthew 22:37-40; Romans 3:23

Article 1: Image of God

We affirm that God created each human being in His image with intrinsic and equal worth, dignity, and moral agency, distinct from all creation, and that humanity’s creativity is intended to reflect God’s creative pattern.

We deny that any part of creation, including any form of technology, should ever be used to usurp or subvert the dominion and stewardship which has been entrusted solely to humanity by God; nor should technology be assigned a level of human identity, worth, dignity, or moral agency.

Genesis 1:26-28; 5:1-2; Isaiah 43:6-7; Jeremiah 1:5; John 13:34; Colossians 1:16; 3:10; Ephesians 4:24

The preservation and restoration of historical buildings and landmarks

Time flows. It keeps flowing and running constantly, and so does the community and the world along with it. There is this debate about what life and death are, and the intermediate catalyst is time, but the whole debate falls short of the hypothesis when it comes to architecture. Architecture – the walls built by the ancestors, the structures which were a refuge for many people, the institutions built to house communities , the tall columns and buttresses which connected the people to Thee, these spatial narratives keep living on and on and on. Architecture is a dead static element in space, the intervention of people is what gets life into it. Architecture at its best represents a balanced, symbiosis of aesthetic values peculiar to works of art and the material requirements of practical utility. To preserve its rich heritage and cultural inheritance becomes of utmost importance.

The Life and Death of Architecture

Over the years, monuments representing the ambitions, aspirations, and beliefs of people have been constructed by civilizations all over the world in a state-of-the-art level of extravagance and immovable scales. These structures are not only valuable in terms of architectural significance but also historical, artistic, and social importance. Many people have survived to the present day and are living proof of the lengthy timeline of human history as well as the numerous ways in which the past has contributed to the present. The survival of this timeless, cultural legacy is currently threatened more than ever before by economic and demographic developments of the world. The preservation and restoration of historical buildings and landmarks are crucial for safeguarding cultural heritage and ensuring the legacy to future generations for appreciation of their valour and grandeur and to learn from the past.

Humankind has always given significance to certain locations or constructions. Others connected them with a specific natural spirit or a divinity – leading to pagan practices and succeeding civilizations with impeccable and intricate architectural structures. There are several locations across the world that exhibit the same type of continuity. In contrast, the temples and long-forgotten empires which were forgotten and vanished later were discovered by archaeologists and unearthed their urns. Even though it would be ethical, it would not be possible to save all. Of the historical buildings. More development and change, as well as new requirements for the ever-growing population of people, would unavoidably eliminate much of the past glory. There may not be much of an aesthetic or historical loss. The choice, though, may be very challenging.

Although there have been fortunate exceptions, the rapid social and economic transformation of the 21 st century , particularly in urban areas, has generally proved to be too much for the communities. In order to ensure that adequate and long-term measures are taken nationally to guarantee the preservation of cultural heritage, nearly all countries have found it necessary to introduce legislation and establish institutions or organizations that are either run by the governing bodies or operate under governmental auspices.

Importance of the Life of Architecture – Living Structures

Cultural Heritage: Physical examples of cultural legacy include historical structures and landmarks . They reflect historical society ideals, workmanship, and different architectural styles. Preserving them allows a scope to comprehend and connect with history, customs and sense by preserving traditions and identity of structures.

Education and Research: For researchers, academics, and students, historical landmarks and buildings become a rich and wide source of information. They provide insights into a variety of historical facets, including social circumstances, stratification, economic conditions, engineering, architecture, politics and the arts. Preservation allows for ongoing research and educational possibilities.

Tourism and the Local Economy: Historical sites frequently draw visitors who support regional economies. The preservation and restoration of these sites can boost tourism, resulting in employment, more capital, income, and a boost to the local economy.

Community and Feeling of a Place: Historical structures and landmarks add to a community’s personality, character and sense of space. They act as anchor points and represent the pride and identity of the community. They provide continuity and communal cohesiveness when they are preserved. 

The Current Scenario and A Plea for Change

But in contrast, historical buildings face various threats such as natural ageing, weathering, pollution, and lack of maintenance. Over time, these factors can lead o decay and deterioration. Securing funding and resources for the upkeep, repair, and conservation of historical buildings can pose significant challenges, especially for public or lesser-known structures. Adapting historical structures to meet modern safety and accessibility standards with respect to age, gender, sex and any factor that drives the 21st-century norms while preserving the landmark’s character can be a delicate balance. Finding solutions for this would indeed be a complex task.

Historically and artistically important buildings have been disappearing at an ever-increasing rate during the 21 st century. The natural processes that turn stone into gravel, sand, clay and soil; lumber into humans; and metals into oxides and salts are partially to blame for such damage or wear. Such materials deteriorate under the influence of geo – and climatological elements. Cataclysms have taken their toll. Floods, earthquakes , volcanic explosions, and violent storms have destroyed a few of the most important structures in the long history of human civilization. Regardless, the most serious threat to these important structures is humankind. Wars, the action of vandalism, negligence and recklessness towards the structures and their maintenance, have razed countless monuments; and economic and social factors pose the biggest challenge to the conservation of the existing material cultural heritage.

The protection of cultural heritage, encouragement of education and research, promotion of tourism and economic progress, and upkeep of a feeling of identity and community all depend on the preservation and conservation of historical structures and landmarks. Although there are obstacles, maintaining these systems is worthwhile for cultures all around the world since the advantages exceed the disadvantages. The vision in the coming days would be imagining, connecting, embracing and respecting the old and new fabric of the city and its architecture. Architects and archaeologists should strive to respect the environment and architecture in its existing beauty and amenities and provide hygienic surroundings, so as to afford and offer its citizens a healthy and active lifestyle.

• Unesdoc.unesco.org. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000001105 (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Preserving heritage: 10 restoration projects transforming historic … Available at: https://www.architectandinteriorsindia.com/projects/preserving-heritage-10-restoration-projects-transforming-historic-landmarks (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Admin (2022) The importance of restoring historical monuments, IEREK. Available at: https://www.ierek.com/news/importance-restoring-historical-monuments/ (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Garg, P. (2023) An overview of restoration of monuments in India, RTF | Rethinking The Future. Available at: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-community/a8485-an-overview-of-restoration-of-monuments-in-india/ (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Jayewardene-Pillai, S., Ranaweera, A. and Kaushalya, B. (2017) Geoffrey Manning Bawa: Decolonizing Architecture. Colombo: The National Trust Sri Lanka. 
• Radnić, J., Matešan, D. and Abaza, A. (2020) Restoration and strengthening of historical buildings: The example of Minceta Fortress in Dubrovnik, Advances in Civil Engineering. Available at: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ace/2020/8854397/ (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Subcommittee,  the W.H.P. (2023) Historic preservation  , WBDG. Available at: https://www.wbdg.org/design-objectives/historic-preservation (Accessed: 10 July 2023). 
• Ultimate Guide for Saving Historic Buildings (2021) Wolfe House & Building Movers. Available at: https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/historic-building-preservation-guide/ (Accessed: 10 July 2023).

Srivatsa Koduri is a fresh graduate as an architect from R.V. College of Architecture, Bangalore with a passion for storytelling in architecture and design. With a keen eye for detail and a deep appreciation for design, he delves into the intricacies and the untold stories of buildings - the symbolism and metaphors attached to them, exploring their historical significance and cultural impact concerning the metaphysical aspects of the design. Literature, different art forms, and his love for travel are vital to his architectural perceptions.

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Essay on Historical Monuments: Explore the Importance of Historical Monuments

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Essay on Historical Monuments under 150 Words

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Essay on Historical Monuments: Historical monuments are significant landmarks that represent the past and reflect the cultural, social, and economic aspects of a particular era. They are a source of inspiration and knowledge for the present and future generations, and they are essential in preserving the cultural heritage of a region or a country. India, being a culturally diverse country, is home to a wide range of historical monuments that are spread across the country, each with its own unique architecture, design, and historical significance.

In this article, you will learn how to write essay on historical monuments in different word range.

Essay on Historical Monuments in 350 words

In India, historical monuments can be traced back to ancient times, where kings, emperors, and rulers built them to showcase their power and wealth. These monuments were built using various techniques and styles, such as Mughal, Rajput, Buddhist, and Jain, to name a few. Some of the most popular and well-known historical monuments in India include the Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar, Red Fort, and many more.

The Taj Mahal, located in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, is one of the most popular and recognizable historical monuments in the world. It was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. The Taj Mahal is known for its white marble architecture and intricate carvings, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is a symbol of love and devotion, and it attracts millions of tourists from all over the world every year.

In addition to the Taj Mahal, there are several other historical monuments near Uttar Pradesh that are equally significant. For example, Jhansi Fort, located in the city of Jhansi, is a popular tourist destination and is known for its association with Rani Laxmi Bai, a warrior queen who fought against the British. Other popular historical monuments near Uttar Pradesh include Fatehpur Sikri, Khajuraho, and Sanchi Stupa, to name a few.

Delhi, the capital of India, is home to several historical monuments, each with its own unique history and significance. These monuments include the Red Fort, Jama Masjid, India Gate, and Humayun’s Tomb, among others. The Red Fort, built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is known for its stunning architecture and design. India Gate, on the other hand, is a war memorial that pays tribute to the Indian soldiers who died in World War I.

In conclusion, historical monuments play a crucial role in preserving the cultural heritage of a region or a country. They are a source of inspiration and knowledge for the present and future generations, and they help us understand our past and the people who lived before us. It is important that we protect and preserve these monuments for future generations to come so that they can learn from them and appreciate their cultural significance.

Historical monuments are not just structures, but they are an integral part of our collective heritage. They represent our past and offer valuable insights into our history and culture. The importance of preserving these monuments cannot be overstated. These structures need to be protected and maintained so that future generations can continue to appreciate and learn from them.

India is home to several historical monuments that are a testament to the country’s rich cultural heritage. Monuments like the Taj Mahal, the Jhansi Fort, and the Red Fort are significant tourist attractions that bring millions of visitors to India every year. The government and the public should work together to preserve these historical monuments so that they can continue to inspire and educate future generations.

Historical monuments are an integral part of India’s heritage and culture. They not only serve as a testament to the country’s rich history but also attract tourists from all over the world. Delhi, being the capital of India, is home to several historical monuments that reflect the city’s glorious past. The Red Fort, Qutub Minar, Humayun’s Tomb, and Jama Masjid are some of the famous historical monuments in Delhi that are a must-visit for tourists who want to experience the rich history and culture of India.

Delhi, the capital of India, is a city rich in history and culture. The city is home to several historical monuments that reflect the glorious past of India. These monuments are not just architectural marvels, but they also hold great significance in the Indian history and culture. In this essay, we will explore some of the famous historical monuments in Delhi.

Red Fort: The Red Fort, also known as the Lal Qila, is one of the most famous historical monuments in Delhi. Built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century, the Red Fort is made of red sandstone and is a fine example of Mughal architecture. The fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and attracts tourists from all over the world.

Qutub Minar: The Qutub Minar is a 73-meter-high minaret that was built in the 12th century by Qutb-ud-din Aibak. The minaret is made of red sandstone and marble and is considered to be one of the finest examples of Indo-Islamic architecture. The Qutub Minar is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is visited by millions of tourists every year.

Humayun’s Tomb: Humayun’s Tomb is a magnificent mausoleum built in the 16th century for the Mughal emperor Humayun. The tomb is made of red sandstone and white marble and is considered to be the first garden-tomb in India. The tomb is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is known for its beautiful architecture and lush gardens.

Jama Masjid: The Jama Masjid is one of the largest mosques in India and was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century. The mosque is made of red sandstone and white marble and can accommodate over 25,000 worshippers at a time. The Jama Masjid is a must-visit for tourists who want to experience the rich Islamic culture of India.

Apart from these monuments, Delhi is also home to other historical landmarks such as India Gate, Lotus Temple, and the Akshardham Temple. These monuments not only reflect the architectural and cultural richness of India but also serve as a reminder of the country’s glorious past.

India is home to some of the world’s most magnificent and historically significant monuments. Indian historical monuments are a testament to the country’s rich cultural and architectural heritage. These monuments have stood the test of time and have become an integral part of India’s identity.

The importance of Indian historical monuments cannot be overstated. They not only serve as reminders of India’s glorious past but also attract millions of tourists every year. The tourism industry has become a significant contributor to India’s economy, and historical monuments play a crucial role in this.

The history of historical monuments in India dates back to ancient times. India has been home to several empires and civilizations, each leaving behind their unique mark on the country’s landscape. The monuments from different eras and cultures offer a glimpse into India’s diverse and rich past.

Also read, Invest in our Planet Essay .

The Taj Mahal is undoubtedly one of the most iconic historical monuments in India. Located in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, the Taj Mahal was built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. The monument is a masterpiece of Mughal architecture and is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Taj Mahal is not just a symbol of love but also represents the pinnacle of Mughal architecture. The monument is a fusion of Indian, Persian, and Islamic architectural styles, making it a unique structure. The Taj Mahal is made of white marble and is adorned with intricate carvings and inlays of precious stones.

The significance of the Taj Mahal goes beyond its architectural and design features. The monument is a symbol of India’s rich cultural heritage and attracts millions of tourists every year. The Taj Mahal is a testament to the enduring power of love and serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving our historical monuments.

Uttar Pradesh is home to several historical monuments that are worth visiting. One such monument is the Jhansi Fort, which played a crucial role in India’s struggle for independence. The fort is located in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh and is a significant tourist attraction.

The Jhansi Fort is an excellent example of medieval Indian architecture. The fort’s design is a blend of Rajput and Mughal architectural styles, making it a unique structure. The fort’s history is closely linked to the legendary Rani Lakshmibai, who fought against the British during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Another historical monument near Uttar Pradesh is the Khajuraho Group of Monuments. Located in Madhya Pradesh, these monuments are famous for their erotic sculptures and intricate carvings. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and attracts tourists from all over the world.

Historical monuments are structures or sites that have significant historical, cultural, or architectural value. These monuments are often symbols of the past, representing a particular era or civilization. They serve as a reminder of our ancestors and their achievements, and their preservation is crucial for future generations to understand and appreciate our collective history. This essay aims to explore the importance of historical monuments, with a specific focus on Indian monuments such as the Taj Mahal, as well as monuments near Uttar Pradesh and in Delhi.

British Council

Destroying cultural heritage: more than just material damage, by stephen stenning, 21 august 2015 - 10:14.

DVIDSHUB, licensed under CC BY 2.0 and adapted from the original .

Only a few weeks ago, the UK government  vouched to ratify  the 1954  Hague Convention  for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Meanwhile, the British Council's Stephen Stenning provides some answers about why we should care about preserving the world's cultural heritage.

What is cultural heritage?

The word ‘culture’ is sometimes used to refer to the highest intellectual endeavours and the pursuit of perfection and beauty. As the poet and critic Matthew Arnold  put it , culture is 'the best that has been thought and known in the world'. We now more commonly think of culture as being about beliefs, customs, language and arts of a particular society, group, place, or time and the symbols and expression of shared values, traditions and customs.

Cultural heritage is typically understood to be built heritage, monuments related to culture such as museums, religious buildings, ancient structures and sites. However, we should also include the slightly less material things, i.e., stories, poems, plays, recipes, customs, fashions, designs, music, songs and ceremonies of a place, as cultural heritage. These are vital expressions of a culture and just as important.

Why should we protect cultural heritage?

Societies have long sought to protect and preserve their cultural heritage, for reasons ranging from education to historical research to the desire to reinforce a sense of identity. In times of war and conflict, cultural identity and cultural heritage become all the more important. Buildings, monuments and symbols of culture that speak of shared roots acquire an increased significance. Accordingly, they can become targets of violent and oppressive action that seeks to destroy the symbols valued by enemies or the iconography associated with alternative faiths and traditions.

What are the main recent examples of this type of destruction?

Two examples immediately spring to mind. The first is Palmyra, the world heritage site and ancient city in the Syrian desert, which has this year fallen into the hands of ‘Daesh’/ ‘Islamic State’ (henceforth: ISIL). The other is the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001.

To date, ISIL seem to be using the site of Palmyra as a shield, knowing that others will not want to risk damaging it, but they have blown up a number of tombs on or near the site.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were the world’s two largest Buddhas, standing well over 150 feet high. The Taliban used tank and anti-aircraft fire to destroy the 1,700-year-old sandstone structures. Additionally, and in response to an edict from the then Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, holes were drilled into the torsos and dynamite inserted in order to complete the destruction. His foreign minister, Mullah Wakil, was  quoted as saying : 'We do admit the relics were the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, but the part that contradicts our beliefs we would not like to have them anymore [sic].'

In the last few months, we've seen footage of ISIL fighters taking sledgehammers to 3,000-year-old statues in Mosul museum and using explosives to destroy the ancient city of Nimrud in Iraq. Beyond that, and the damage done as a result of conflict to other heritage sites such as the Ziggurat of Ur (also in Iraq), the threat to cultural heritage continues.

Verity Cridland, licensed under CC BY 2.0 and adapted from the original .

Pillaging as a result of the conflict has prompted the  World Monuments Fund  to list Iraq itself as an ‘endangered site’. It is the first time it has ever listed a whole country. Of 15,000 artefacts looted from the National Museum in Iraq, only around 3,500 have been recovered, resulting in a growing trade of stolen treasures. As with Iraq and Syria, Libya has a wealth of archaeological and heritage sites suffering accidental and deliberate damage, and similarly, looting has meant that the trade in stolen artefacts is just as serious a problem in North Africa.

Which historic sites have been destroyed for good? Have any been rebuilt or are they lost forever?

One starting point might be the seven wonders of the ancient world and how many remain. I live close to the only one that remains reasonably intact, the Great Pyramid of Giza. I don’t have technical expertise in preservation, but I know that rebuilding is not a straightforward issue. For example, experts have created scale models of what the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus might have looked like on completion around 350 BC. However, no-one is suggesting we rebuild from the ruins that are a heritage site in Turkey today. To do so would be regarded as a desecration. When there is minor damage to an ancient structure, there are attempts to sensitively restore it, but in the case of destruction, all you can really do is create a replica and, either actually or virtually, offer a sense of what has come before. For example, it is possible that, in the future, new giant Buddhas may be built again on the site in Bamiyan, but the structures that stood there for 1,700 years observed by passing generations and civilisations have been destroyed.

What could we put at a country's disposal now to protect cultural sites or even secure them?

There is a great deal of expertise in the UK when it comes to preserving both tangible and intangible heritage. The British Council is able to  share that expertise  because it's physically present in several countries, understands the local context, and is able to identify and work with the local infrastructure.

We work regularly with the national museums, but also broker direct partnerships between them and institutions in cities across the UK. The British Museum, for example, has been very active in Iraq over the last ten years, helping to preserve Iraqi cultural heritage, regularly sending survey teams to report and monitor sites and collections and, in 2009, carrying out a full inspection of Babylon on behalf of UNESCO.

There is, in the Middle East and in North Africa, a very clear need for better and more thorough recording and archiving of all aspects of cultural heritage. We are regularly asked to support programmes that seek to create archives of films, literature, music and performance, as well as for antiquities and artefacts. To date, we have been able to support one-off projects, whereas there is a need for sustained and co-ordinated action. Digitisation of records is also very important for the protection and preservation of collections, and again, we are in a position to bring in and share expertise from other UK institutions.

The potential of new media goes beyond better and more accessible archives.  Scottish Ten , for example, is a project that set out, in 2009, to digitally document Scotland’s five world heritage sites along with five international sites to better conserve and manage them. The project has already scanned monuments in Japan, India and a world heritage site in China. Such technology and expertise could be used in vulnerable locations to digitally document and then produce virtual recreations.

Training staff in  managing museums and sites  is also a vital part of cultural protection, as is developing their skills and preservation techniques, and constructing sophisticated systems in response to threat.

A further area of enormous importance to heritage protection is the connection between heritage venues and sites on the one hand and the general public on the other. If collections and the institutions that house them are valued and seen as social, cultural and economic assets, it is easier to garner support for their protection.

What are the effects of cultural destruction?

It is a difficult thing to describe, so I will use a couple of bizarrely different examples to try and provide a short answer.

Hollywood movies that seek to terrify their audiences with apocalyptic scenarios tend to use the destruction of iconic buildings and structures as their climactic image. In one example, the audience knows that New York has turned into a wasteland, not because it sees a wasteland, but because only the torch held aloft by the statue of liberty is visibly poking through the sands that now submerge the city; the Golden Gate Bridge is torn apart by a tidal wave; the statue of Admiral Nelson lies in pieces at the foot of a crumbling column, and so on. Why can those images be so much more effective and horrifying than images of human beings dying? It is because they speak of the destruction of an entire city, a society, a nation, a civilisation, and a way of life. The destruction represents not just the destruction of those immediately living alongside these monuments, but of entire generations.

At the  Syria: Third Space  exhibition earlier this year, you could see Zaher Omareen's disturbing footage, including from news reels, of death and destruction in and around Syria. He had created beautiful and sometimes harrowing films by putting poems, stories and music behind them. One piece showed the destruction of a mosque to an operatic score. I was told about the effect it had had on a Syrian who knew the building well. She was a Christian and had never been inside the mosque, but it was the symbol of the area she grew up in. It was devastating to her for much the same reason as the movie example. It wasn't about the building alone, but its destruction was representative of all that was gone forever.

What motivates extremists to destroy cultural sites?

There is a form of extremism that sees the very existence of sites that are celebrating other people’s faiths or cultures as a challenge, as the above quotation by Mullah Wakil about the Buddhas of Bamiyan indicates.

People in Europe sometimes think they are very far removed from those attitudes, but they wouldn't have to look too hard to find equivalents close to home, and not too long ago. As a child, I was regularly taken to churches and cathedrals in France and noticed that most of the statues adorning them were headless. Revolutionaries were perhaps not destroying them as a religious statement as much as a political one, but it was wanton destruction. In the UK, you don’t have to go back to the reformation to find examples of churches, monasteries and symbols of faith being destroyed for sectarian reasons.

There are also many other relatively recent examples of the deliberate destruction of another’s culture. In 1942, Nazi Germany had ordered the  Baedeker Blitz , air raids on cultural sites in the UK in response to the destruction of Lübeck's old town in the same year.

There is probably a number of similarities between the attitudes of the Third Reich and ISIL when it comes to cultural diversity. I am not sure that I recognise the notion that ISIL make themselves look even 'more ridiculous' by these actions, as is sometimes said. They inspire horror and fear, and I guess that is part of the point. It is ruthless in its mission to present its way as an uncomplicated, non-compromised and pure form of Islam. Its adherents wish to remove not only symbols of other faiths, but also anything valued by those who follow Islam in a different way. References to pre-Islamic history that could distract the faithful are therefore anathema.

What's the international response to this? What more could be done?

When it comes to the immediate fears for the amazing world heritage sites in the Middle East that are already caught up in the battles, it is difficult to see what can be done until the military action ends. There is an online campaign to ‘ Save Palmyra ’ that boasts an astonishing alliance of peoples from different countries, faiths and political allegiances. It includes supporters of most of the factions currently fighting in Iraq and Syria. There is a need for a united and co-ordinated international response to support and strengthen local initiatives.

Signing up to the Hague Convention and committing to more robust action on cultural protection, as the UK government is now set to do, is important as a way of strengthening the international coalition and even opening the possibility of rapid response to impending threats.

With sites at risk, there is much more that can be done, for example through the virtual mapping of sites, so that they are preserved digitally, as well as working on the relationship between populations and their cultural heritage.

We need to give equal weight to preserving the intangible heritage. This is not least because there is often much more that can be done in that area, even while the conflict is raging. We have a partnership to that effect with Action For Hope, an organisation that works with Syrian refugees in Jordan. Initially a project that provided comfort to refugee families by helping them cook familiar, evocative and culturally important dishes, it has now expanded and become an important part of building resilience among them. Archives of photos, film footage, stories, poems and oral histories help those who normally see themselves as victims maintain their cultural identity and pride.

We are looking for UK partners to deliver four specialist courses for emerging museum and gallery leaders from around the world at our International Museum Academy in the UK in August 2016. The deadline to  apply  is 14 September 2015.

Editor's note: This article was updated on 24 August 2015, following the destruction of Palmyra's Baalshamin temple.

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• What do Syrian refugees think about their country's crisis?
• Why Arabic should be taught in UK schools
• What are Syrian artists showing us about the conflict?

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National landmarks show two views of American history. Which is yours?

This election year, historic landmarks mark a dividing line between competing visions of america's past..

SOCORRO, Texas – A warm wind blew through the old farmworker camp Saturday as Victor Reta, his voice catching, announced that the crumbling adobe buildings around him had finally been designated a National Historic Landmark . 

It had taken 10 years of paperwork, bureaucratic wrangling and persistence for federal officials to formally recognize a site where hundreds of thousands of Mexican men were recruited into the United States beginning in World War II to work on farms.

At Rio Vista, hiring bosses groped their muscles, examined their hands for calluses that would prove they knew hard labor, and “deloused” them with the toxic pesticide DDT . The Bracero Program ‒ named for the Spanish word for a manual laborer ‒ laid the groundwork for the migrant labor pipeline into the U.S. that still exists today.

As recreation director of the community center at Rio Vista, Reta led the local effort to get federal recognition before the buildings buckled further in desert winds and monsoon rains. But now, National Park Service protection will help tell the story of the braceros and the millions of Mexican Americans who can trace their past to what some have called an Ellis Island in the Southwest.

“I’ve seen our culture and heritage and stories either get lost or muddied,” said Reta, whose grandfather and father were migrant farmworkers. “Unfortunately, our history books don’t necessarily share the whole picture.”

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With its new historic landmark designation Rio Vista became part of a sprawling-but-quiet effort to reshape how America's past gets told. This election year provides two competing visions of our nation's history: one, based on tales of glory and exceptionalism; the other more reflective of the stories told around a wider range of family dinner tables.

There are 2,635 National Historic Landmarks in the U.S., according to the park service, which is in charge of naming landmarks, as well as providing some grants, technical advice and support to the sites, though it does not own or run most of them. As of 2022, the agency listed just 40 landmarks directly related to the heritage of Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the LGBTQ community and women.

Since then, capitalizing on years of legwork and community organizing by people like Reta, the park service, under President Joe Biden , has announced millions in spending to tell a broader variety of American stories.

To recognize the history of African Americans, the park service recently launched a study to add lynching sites in Tennessee; an Ohio stop on the Underground Railroad and an Illinois exhibition on the role Pullman porters played in creating the Black middle class. Just last month, the park service announced more than $23 million in grants as part of its Historic Preservation Fund’s African American Civil Rights.

It is also honoring Asian American history at a detention camp in Colorado where thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were locked up during World War II. Earlier this month, the park service expanded a scenic, 11-mile-long ridgeline to a national monument considered sacred to Native American tribes in Northern California.

But the federal efforts come as dozens of states, including Florida, Texas and Oklahoma, have adopted or proposed measures that limit how Black, Latino or LGBTQ history is taught or that restrict the use of some books. Supporters of the so-called ‘’anti-woke’’ laws said such measures will prohibit teaching divisive issues in public schools and blaming current generations for past injustices such as slavery.

Donald Trump , the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has emphasized a celebratory vision of America's past rather than one that highlights periods of failure and shame.

If re-elected in November, he intends to resume a plan he laid out during his first term to build a National Garden of American Heroes, said Karoline Leavitt, the campaign's national press secretary. It would include statues "of the greatest Americans who ever lived, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass and Clara Barton, to Rosa Parks, Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, Vince Lombardi, and more than 200 others," she said via email.

"As he did for four years, President Trump will seek to preserve our historic sites and landmarks for all Americans, so that citizens of all backgrounds can learn about and appreciate our great American story," she said, adding that the garden would be completed "in time for America's 250th birthday on July 4, 2026 to help our country be proud and united."

Until recently, landmarks have been mostly bipartisan efforts.

Jason Williams, associate professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said he wouldn't be surprised if the current focus on these landmarks becomes a political issue once more people learn about it.

“I can see how this initiative by the National Parks Service could be picked up as a political football by the GOP mainly because of what we've been seeing lately in terms of their disdain for DEI (diversity initiatives) and cultural pluralism,’’ he said.

It's important for all Americans to see themselves and their histories in the country's landmarks, Shannon Estenoz, who oversees the Interior Department's National Park Service, told USA Today.

“We have to be able to confront those stories and interpret them and put them in front of future generations so that they understand all of the chapters of our nation's history’’ she said . “Black history is American history. Native American history is American history. This is all part of the story of our nation."

And nationals parks, she said, are the perfect places to tell ‒ and hear ‒ those stories. “You can read and you should read history in books and you should go to museums and you should do all of those things. But the Park Service invites us to come and stand where it happened.”

Here are some places the National Park Service is preserving:

Everybody's history

Many braceros took what they endured at Rio Vista to the grave. Few are still left to tell their stories.

José María Rodriguez was an eager 19-year-old following his father’s footsteps when he left Mexico to pick cotton and cantaloupes in Texas in 1964.

His first stop in the U.S. was Rio Vista.

“Like anything, it was hard,” Rodriguez, now 80, said, recalling the melon fields. “You carried a sack over your shoulder, across your chest. You picked them and put them in the bag. It was really heavy.”

Rodriguez, fit and chipper, returns five days a week to the old camp to keep company with fellow elders, eat lunch and play rounds of a bingo game called lotería. Community-focused preservation plans for the historic landmark site also include a public library, health clinic and new bracero museum.

Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Rio Vista lead historian, said an unknown number – possibly millions – of Americans who trace their roots to Mexico had a bracero in their family.

“As Latinos become more of the population, we don’t know what our place in history has been,” she said. “That the federal government is doing this, and that the Park Service is doing this, for indigenous people, for Latino people, for African American people, it’s so important. Not just for the people of color – for everybody to learn that history.”

Detainees and liberators

Mitch Homma's father was locked up at Amache as a child, along with his father's two siblings and their parents.

None of the detainees was credibly accused of any specific crime or received legal due process, but they were all nonetheless forced to sell or give up their homes and businesses over fears they might sympathize with Japan following the Pearl Harbor attack.

Most endured long train rides to the hastily constructed camps like this one in Grenada, Colorado, where they were forced to live in cramped conditions for several years during the war.

Many military-age men from the camps volunteered for the front lines of the war, joining the segregated 3,000-man 442nd Regimental Combat Team that became one of the most decorated units of the war. In three years, 31 Amache men were killed in combat, and the unit overall received 21 Medals of Honor and nearly 10,000 Purple Hearts. Its members also helped liberate the Nazi Dachau death camp.

For many years, the sole federal site dedicated to telling this story was Manzanar National Historic Site in eastern California near Death Valley.

"(It was) better than nothing, but still isolating and constraining that part of history," Homma said.

Preserving history: Facing development and decay, endangered US sites hope national honor can aid revival

Although some high school classes may mention the "internment" camps, few learn the details or explore the parallels between places like Amache and the German-run concentration camps where millions of Jewish people were locked up and killed during the war.

Homma's grandfather died of a heart attack in Amache at age 44. Before his detention, he had been a well-respected Los Angeles dentist with actress Shirley Temple among his clients. When he was sent to the camp, he was forced to sell everything to white buyers for pennies on the dollar.

Several other sites later received presidential designations as national historical sites, but Amache in 2022 became the first since Manzanar to receive congressional approval as a National Historic Site. A deeply divided Congress found common cause in preserving Amache: The House vote to approve the measure was 416-2 and unanimous in the Senate.

Homma said he and other Japanese Americans wanted Amache to go through the congressional process to help ensure elected officials were on the record in support.

"So yes, there is a change in landscape," Homma said. "This is part of the telling of America's underrepresented story."

Protecting sacred land

The wildflower superbloom along Northern California’s inner coast range is a visual representation of the joy members of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation feel about the recent expansion of the Berryessa Snow National Monument.

“Everybody is smiling,” Tribal Chairman Anthony Roberts said. “We’ve cared for this sacred land for countless generations. This means a lot to us.”

The expansion, in the works for almost a decade, adds nearly 14,000 acres of federal land to the already 330,000-acre monument. 

The tribe, as well as other indigenous nations, including the Kletsel Dehe Wintun and the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians, envision preserving an old trade route, as well as improving a recreational trail to attract hikers, sightseers and bikers from San Francisco to Sacramento.

Yocha Dehe Wintun Treasurer Leland Kinter said a key tribal goal is reintroducing the endangered California condor to the area. Molok Luyuk, the new name of the park's scenic ridge, means Condor Ridge in their native language of Patwin, he said.

“The condor plays an important role in our religion, in our regalia and our ceremonial dances,” Kinter said. “It will help give us further respect for our history.”

'It's a story that American needs'

For Helen Hart, the artifacts at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C, where she's a ranger, tell a story about his mission to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. “He’s trying to talk to us,’’ said Hart.

Douglass, who became an abolitionist after escaping from slavery, moved to Washington in the 1870s . He intentionally bought a house in a whites-only neighborhood at a high elevation.

“From his front porch he can see the places where decisions are being made that are going to affect untold billions into the future,” said Kevin Bryant, another ranger. Eighty five steps lead up to the Douglass house where visitors can see the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol

“From his front porch he can see the places where decisions are being made that are going to affect untold billions into the future,” said Kevin Bryant, another ranger. Eighty five steps lead up to the Douglass house where visitors can see the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol in the distance.

Douglass spent the last 18 years of his life here and about 50,000 people a year visit, peeking in the parlor where Douglass once met with visitors and peering into the office where he sat at his desk and crafted his famous speeches.

With African American history under attack, it’s particularly important that sites like the Douglass house are preserved, said Sylvia Quinton, president of the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association. “Protecting our history through the federal government is the surest way to ensure that our history is not erased,’’ she said.

Owners of Marilyn Monroe's Brentwood home want to block historic monument designation

T he owners of Marilyn Monroe's former Brentwood home will ask a judge next month to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the city from continuing with its efforts to make the residence a historic cultural monument, which would prevent its demolition.

Attorneys for real estate heiress Brinah Milstein and her husband, producer Roy Bank, filed court papers Thursday with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant in which they say the city is violating the law by trying to give the home historical recognition. The pair have owned the structure since last July and have obtained a demolition permit from the city.

The petition seeks a court order blocking the monument designation and allowing the plaintiffs to move forward with their planned demolition so they can demolish the Monroe structure to expand their current home, which is adjacent to the property.

"Absent such a preliminary injunction, owners will suffer irreparable harm," the couple's lawyers argue in their Court papers.

The City Council has until June 16 to approve making the home a historic cultural monument status.

"This timeline of expected city action, and the continued violation of owners' vested rights, has created the urgency of owners' verified petition and complaint, the needed redress and remedies," according to the couple's attorneys' pleadings.

A hearing on the motion is scheduled June 4. In a sworn declaration that includes multiple photos, Bank says the recent publicity about the case has drawn gawkers and traffic to the area's narrow streets.

"As owners of the property, my wife and I cannot even begin to estimate the damage to us and our rights if the city's intended designation of the property goes through," Bank says in a sworn declaration in support of the preliminary injunction. "We will be  mired in the heavy burden of owning, perpetually, a tourist magnet creating a circus atmosphere harmful to us and our neighbors."

The couple filed the petition May 6, alleging "illegal and unconstitutional conduct" by the city "with respect to the house where Marilyn Monroe occasionally lived for a mere six months before she tragically committed suicide 61 years ago."

Bank and Milstein allege the city violated its own codes and procedures in pushing for the monument designation for the Helena Drive property.

"All of these backroom machinations were in the name of preserving a house which in no way meets any of the criteria for an historic cultural monument," the petition states. "That much is bolstered by the fact, among others, that for 60 years through 14 owners and numerous remodels and building permits issued by the city, the city has taken no action regarding the now- alleged `historic' or `cultural' status of the house."

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After receiving numerous complaints about the planned demolition, City Councilwoman Traci Park announced in September an effort to save the house by initiating a historic-cultural monument application. The application has been working its way through the city process, receiving approval in January from the Cultural Heritage Commission and later from the council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

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News & Reviews News Wire ‘Trails and Rails’ programs on Amtrak trains return for 2024

‘Trails and Rails’ programs on Amtrak trains return for 2024

New agreement extends partnership for five years

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WASHINGTON — National Park Service volunteers from national or historic parks and monuments along Amtrak routes are again be hosting informative programs aboard trains this summer and fall under the “Trails and Rails” program.

The table below shows the segments and days of the week where personnel discuss the historical significance of the route’s points of interest. On trains with a lecturer aboard, an initial announcement is made throughout the train inviting passengers to visit the Sightseer Lounge or cafe car, where supporting literature is displayed for anyone wishing to participate. Several other train-wide announcements might be made passing significant points of interest, but their duration is limited to 45 seconds, according the service manual.

Route selection depends on the availability of volunteers to staff the sessions and whether schedules allow them to make manageable round trips. This year’s lineup is similar to the 2023 program, but two programs won’t be back: Cumberland, Md. to Washington D.C. on the Capitol Limited and the Westport-Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Adirondack segment . That Montreal-New York City train is suspended north of Saratoga Springs from May 20 to June 30 for trackwork [see, “Adirondack to be cancelled in northern New York State …,” Trains News Wire, May 9, 2024].

Ideally, sessions hosted by a National Park Service volunteer are best held in a Sightseer lounge car where passengers can congregate freely, but the Coast Starlight, City of New Orleans, and the Empire Builder’s St. Paul-Columbus segment are the only listed trains which operate with those glass-topped cars. The Empire Builder’s Seattle section utilizes part of a Superliner diner, and the Texas Eagle has a “Cross Country Cafe” diner-snack bar with a few tables.

Heartland Flyer commentary is piped throughout the train’s Superliner coaches primarily between Pauls Valley and Ardmore, Okla., according to coordinator Matt Whitney. The volunteers that pass out descriptive materials and Junior Ranger books may include Marcie Doussette, who dresses in early-20th-century attire. Other trains with Trails and Rails programs utilize single level Amfleet or Horizon cafe cars with limited table space and seating.

The Crescent program’s situation is the most challenging, from both a schedule and space standpoint. Because the New York-New Orleans train’s Viewliner dining car was withdrawn in 2020, available space consists of half of an Amfleet II lounge car with limited seating and a window configuration that doesn’t line up with adjacent seats except at one table. In 2021, running times were lengthened. To allow for crew rest at New Orleans, the northbound train’s departure from the Crescent City was set back more than 2 hours. The combination of these factors means the northbound’s Atlanta arrival is now scheduled for 11 p.m. instead of 7:30 p.m. (The current schedule is available here .)

Mickey Goodson, program coordinator at Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park, tells News Wire that on the old schedule, volunteers might ride all the way to New Orleans five or six times per week and return the next day. The new times mean a lengthy layover at Birmingham, very long days for volunteers, and darkness falling hours before the train from New Orleans enters Atlanta. As a result, assignments for this summer’s trips are still being finalized. He says interpretive programs on the Atlanta-Birmingham segment “have a strong history theme,” focusing on the role topography has played in determining how events took place.

National Park Services Volunteer Partnerships Coordinator Jim Miculka reports his organization renewed its agreement with Amtrak for the next five years last month, and 2025 will be the 25th anniversary of the formal, nationwide partnership.

“We recently had National Park Service Director Charles “Chuck” Sams III onboard the Coast Starlight and a Northeast Corridor train,” Miculka tells News Wire, adding, “It was great to have him experience the Trails and Rails program and meet the volunteers and staff that coordinate and present the programs.”

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Guest Essay

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

By Steven Hahn

Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”

In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” Mr. Trump told Time, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Further evidence, it seems, of Mr. Trump’s efforts to construct a political world like no other in American history. But how unprecedented is it, really? That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.

Many of us have not wanted to see it that way. “This is not who we are as a nation,” one journalist exclaimed in what was a common response to the violence on Jan. 6, “and we must not let ourselves or others believe otherwise.” Mr. Biden has said much the same thing.

While it’s true that Mr. Trump was the first president to lose an election and attempt to stay in power, observers have come to recognize the need for a lengthier view of Trumpism. Even so, they are prone to imagining that there was a time not all that long ago when political “normalcy” prevailed. What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view.

Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.

A few examples may be illustrative. Although European colonization of North America has often been imagined as a sharp break from the ways of home countries, neo-feudal dreams inspired the making of Euro-American societies from the Carolinas up through the Hudson Valley, based as they were on landed estates and coerced labor, while the Puritan towns of New England, with their own hierarchies, demanded submission to the faith and harshly policed their members and potential intruders alike. The backcountry began to fill up with land-hungry settlers who generally formed ethnicity-based enclaves, eyed outsiders with suspicion and, with rare exceptions, hoped to rid their territory of Native peoples. Most of those who arrived in North America between the early 17th century and the time of the American Revolution were either enslaved or in servitude, and master-servant jurisprudence shaped labor relations well after slavery was abolished, a phenomenon that has been described as “belated feudalism.”

The anti-colonialism of the American Revolution was accompanied not only by warfare against Native peoples and rewards for enslavers, but also by a deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism, and hostility to Catholics remained a potent political force well into the 20th century. Monarchist solutions were bruited about during the writing of the Constitution and the first decade of the American Republic: John Adams thought that the country would move in such a direction and other leaders at the time, including Washington, Madison and Hamilton, wondered privately if a king would be necessary in the event a “republican remedy” failed.

The 1830s, commonly seen as the height of Jacksonian democracy, were racked by violent expulsions of Catholics , Mormons and abolitionists of both races, along with thousands of Native peoples dispossessed of their homelands and sent to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

The new democratic politics of the time was often marked by Election Day violence after campaigns suffused with military cadences, while elected officials usually required the support of elite patrons to guarantee the bonds they had to post. Even in state legislatures and Congress, weapons could be brandished and duels arranged; “bullies” enforced the wills of their allies.

When enslavers in the Southern states resorted to secession rather than risk their system under a Lincoln administration, they made clear that their Confederacy was built on the cornerstone of slavery and white supremacy. And although their crushing defeat brought abolition, the establishment of birthright citizenship (except for Native peoples), the political exclusion of Confederates, and the extension of voting rights to Black men — the results of one of the world’s great revolutions — it was not long before the revolution went into reverse.

The federal government soon allowed former Confederates and their white supporters to return to power, destroy Black political activism and, accompanied by lynchings (expressing the “will” of white communities), build the edifice of Jim Crow: segregation, political disfranchisement and a harsh labor regime. Already previewed in the pre-Civil War North, Jim Crow received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court and the administration of Woodrow Wilson .

Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.

The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

Most worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan, energized by anti-Catholicism and antisemitism as well as anti-Black racism, marched brazenly in cities great and small. The Klan became a mass movement and wielded significant political power; it was crucial, for example , to the enforcement of Prohibition. Once the organization unraveled in the late 1920s, many Klansmen and women found their way to new fascist groups and the radical right more generally.

Sidelined by the Great Depression and New Deal, the illiberal right regained traction in the late 1930s, and during the 1950s won grass-roots support through vehement anti-Communism and opposition to the civil rights movement. As early as 1964, in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama began to hone a rhetoric of white grievance and racial hostility that had appeal in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic, and Barry Goldwater’s campaign that year, despite its failure, put winds in the sails of the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom.

Four years later, Wallace mobilized enough support as a third-party candidate to win five states. And in 1972, once again as a Democrat, Wallace racked up primary wins in both the North and the South before an assassination attempt forced him out of the race. Growing backlashes against school desegregation and feminism added further fuel to the fire on the right, paving the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, the neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke had won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature and nearly three-fifths of the white vote in campaigns for governor and senator. Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, called for “America First,” the fortification of the border (a “Buchanan fence”), and a culture war for the “soul” of America, while the National Rifle Association became a powerful force on the right and in the Republican Party.

When Mr. Trump questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president, a project that quickly became known as “birtherism,” he made use of a Reconstruction-era racist trope that rejected the legitimacy of Black political rights and power. In so doing, Mr. Trump began to cement a coalition of aggrieved white voters. They were ready to push back against the nation’s growing cultural diversity — embodied by Mr. Obama — and the challenges they saw to traditional hierarchies of family, gender and race. They had much on which to build.

Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “ Illiberal America: a History .”

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