Monumental Perceptions

MONUMENTS ARE ERECTED TO CELEBRATE VICTORIES AND MOURN LOSSES. WE CHISEL NAMES INTO buildings as a way to claim a piece of posterity. But what happens when those same statues and touted heroes are no longer role models for society’s current values? In the wake of the George Floyd protests this summer, statues throughout America of Christopher Columbus, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, John Calhoun and others have been torn down. Princeton University removed President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public Policy and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City requested that a statue of President Theodore Roosevelt be removed from the front of its building because it depicts Black and indigenous people in an inferior way. What is the value in monuments to the past? Award-winning historian Keith Lowe tackles these questions among others in his new book, Prisoners of History (St. Martin’s, December). In this excerpt from his book, Lowe explores the differing attitudes to monuments by Europeans and Americans by analyzing the