Monday’s Monument: The Stele of Freedom, Libreville, Gabon
Near the business center of Libreville, in front of the Presidential Palace, the stele of freedom commemorates the end of the slave trade in 1848. Following Schoelcher's declaration, 272 enslaved men, women and children were freed and then founded the city of...
Monday’s Monument: Statue of Jaroslav Hašek, Prague, Czech Republic
This equestrian statue by Karel Nepraš was installed in the Žižkov district of Prague, Czech Republic in 2005, having been completed by Karolína Neprašová after her father's death. It is located in an area where Hašek lived during writing of his famous novel The Good...
Monday’s Monument: Jean Diot and Bruno Lenoir Plaque, Paris, France
Jean Diot and Bruno Lenoir were two French men arrested and charged with the crime of homosexuality in Paris in 1750. They were the last persons executed in France as punishment for being gay. In 2014, Paris officials...
Since May 2015, every Monday morning I have been posting a little essay about a peace or social justice monument. For more than a decade, ever since the peaceCENTER was contracted by a national peace & human rights group to develop a workshop exploring strategies for creating memorials about acts of violence and injustice that did not glorify the bloodshed, we have pondered the relationship between the landscape and civic memory.
“I would rather take care of the stomachs of the living
than the glory of the departed in the form of monuments.”
Alfred Nobel
As we showcase these monuments we hope you will join us in this exploration. For now, we’re concentrating on publicly accessible outdoor works. Some are grassroots and homespun; others, more complicated in their funding and execution. They all have a story to tell and we can learn from all of them.
Monday’s Monument: Peace: Eastlake Park Civil Rights Monument, Phoenix, Arizona
The Eastlake Park Civil Rights Memorial, titled Peace, was created in 1997 to reflect the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and Arizona. The memorial comprises a small concrete amphitheater covered by an arched steel canopy modeled after the...
Monday’s Monument: Statue of Margaret Cruickshank, Waimate, New Zealand
Located in a small rural town this statue honors the life of Margaret Cruickshank, a local doctor who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. At its unveiling on July 25, 1923, it was the first monument erected in New Zealand to a woman other than Queen Victoria....
Monday’s Monument: Monument des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, Paris, France
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the founding document of the French republic. A product of the 1789 French Revolution, it reflected a radically new view of human rights. The Monument to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the...
Monday’s Monument: Joseph Lister Memorial, London, England
The Joseph Lister Memorial by the sculptor Thomas Brock is in Portland Place in Marylebone. The memorial is positioned in the center of the road, opposite close to Lister's home at 12 Park Crescent. The memorial was unveiled by Sir John Bland-Sutton, President of...
Monday’s Monument: Eddie Koiko Mabo Monument, Townsville, Australia
The monument commemorates Eddie Koiko Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander who is known for his role in campaigning for Indigenous land rights and for his role in a landmark decision of the High Court of Australia that overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius. or land...
Monday’s Monument: Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls and Lady Gladys Nicholls Memorial
Situated in Parliament Gardens, this memorial commemorates the lives of Douglas and Gladys Nicholls, two leading Aboriginal Australian rights activists from the Cummeragunja Mission in New South Wales. It is the first in the city to depict Aboriginal Australian...
Monday’s Monument: Promise for Life, Columbus, Ohio
Following a presentation by Alfred Tibor, a Holocaust survivor and sculptor, Trinity Lutheran Seminary President Dennis Anderson asked Mr. Tibor to produce a sketch for a public sculpture to be placed in a prominent position on the Trinity campus. The president gave...
Monday’s Monument: Empowerment, Lincoln, England
Designed by the artist Steven Broadbent, sponsored by Alstom Power (now Siemens), and completed in 2002, the Empowerment spans the River Witham in Lincoln's City Square. It takes the form of two aluminum-and-steel human figures reaching to each other across the water....
Monday’s Monument: Catherine Helen Spence Statue, Adelaide, Australia
The sculpture, dedicated in 1966, commemorates Catherine Spence (1825 - 1910), a social and political reformer. The life-size bronze statue was designed by Ieva Pocius and erected for the 150th anniversary of European settlement in South Australia, unveiled by Queen...
Monday’s Monument: Chain Reaction, Melbourne, Australia
Honoring Zelda D’Aprano is a life-size bronze sculpture that captures the spirit of the day in 1969 when the women’s rights campaigner chained herself to a government building to protest against a ruling on equal pay for women. Located in front of the Victorian Trades...
Monday’s Monument: Youth Empowerment, Lagos, Nigeria
Located at Sabo Yaba in Lagos, the sculpture is composed of books arranged in a disjointed pyramid with figures sitting or standing on them. The idea was to create awareness to the public about the benefits of education and how it will eradicate social vices from...
Monday’s Monument: Solomon Mahlangu Statue, Mamelodi, South Africa
Anti-apartheid activist Solomon Mahlangu was just 23 years old when he was hanged in the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison. His remains were moved to his birthplace of Mamelodi in 1993, after being buried in Atteridgeville for 24 years. This monument was unveiled in...
Monday’s Monument: Statue of Aneurin Bevan, Cardiff, Wales
A statue at the western end of Queen Street stands in recognition of Aneurin Bevan (1897 – 1960) who is credited with founding the UK's National Health Service (NHS). The statue was erected in 1987, designed by Robert Thomas. "Nye" Bevan...
Monday’s Monument: Monumento a la Virgen de la Paz, Trujillo, Venezuela
The Monumento a la Virgen de la Paz is a colossal statue honoring Mary. Made of concrete with a metal infrastructure, it is located seven miles southwest of the city of Trujillo. The statue is 153 feet tall, designed by the Spanish-Venezuelan sculptor Manuel de la...
Monday’s Monument: I Am A Man Plaza, Memphis, Tennessee
In 1968, Clayborn Temple, an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, became headquarters for the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, which began when two African American sanitation workers were killed in an accident on a city truck. Starting in February, nearly...
Monday’s Monument: Lee County Civil Rights Workers Monument, Tupelo, Mississippi
This polished black granite memorial to everyone who helped advance the movement for civil rights for African Americans in Lee County from the 1950s-1970s is in front of the Lee County Courthouse. The monument is cut in the shape of the state of Mississippi, and reads...
Monday’s Monument: First Declaration of Human Rights by Cyrus the Great, San Diego, California
This site is located near the House of Iran, a cottage which is part of Balboa Park's House of Pacific Relations, built for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition. The furnishings in the little buildings exemplify life in their respective countries. This...
Monday’s Monument: Steilneset Memorial to Victims of Witch Trials, Vardø, Norway
On the bit of the Norwegian Arctic that lops over Sweden and Finland, American artist Louise Bourgeois and Swiss architect Peter Zumthor collaborated on a monument to the ninety-one persons burned there as witches in the seventeenth century. It was dedicated by Queen...
Monday’s Monument: Elisabeth Selbert Statue, Kassel, Germany
Elisabeth Selbert (1896–1986) was a German politician and lawyer, one of the four women who worked on the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948, collectively called the Mütter des Grundgesetzes (English: Mothers of the Basic Law). She had a central...
Monday’s Monument: Peace Memorial, Mōkau, New Zealand
The mine, now painted red and on display in the middle of Mōkau, washed ashore on the southern side of the Mōkau river mouth in December 1942. It is now thought that the Mōkau mine is a German X-type five-horn device, one of a total of 14 moored contact mines that...
Monday Monument: The Embrace, Boston, Massachusetts
The Embrace is a bronze sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas, dedicated on Boston Common in January, 2023. It commemorates Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and depicts four intertwined arms, representing the hug they shared after he was awarded the Nobel...
Monday’s Monument: Paxmal Monument, Walenstadtberg, Switzerland
The Paxmal is a peace monument built by Swiss artist, philosopher and pacifist Karl Bickel between 1924 and 1949, in Walenstadtberg above Walenstadt, in front of the Churfirsten mountain range in Switzerland. Paxmal, a fusion of the Latin word “pax” meaning peace and...
Monday’s Monument: Natalie Zahle Memorial, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Natalie Zahle Memorial is located in Ørsted Park in Copenhagen, close to the school that she founded in 1862. The school became a model for all upper secondary girl's schools in the country. The Natalie Zahle Memorial was the first monument in Copenhagen erected...
Monday’s Monument: Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument, Chicago, Illinois
The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument is a bronze and marble public sculpture by artist Richard Hunt. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the sculpture takes its name from a quote by civil rights activist and investigative...
MONUMENT (n.)
late 13c., “a sepulchre,” from Old French monument “grave, tomb, monument,” and directly from Latin monumentum “a monument, memorial structure, statue; votive offering; tomb; memorial record,” literally “something that reminds,” from monere “to admonish, warn, advice,” from PIE *moneyo-, suffixed (causative) form of root *men- (1) “to think.” Sense of “structure or edifice to commemorate a notable person, action, or event” first attested c. 1600.
Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site
In his book Lies Across America, Professor James Loewen posed these ten questions to ask at a historic site.
1. When did this location become a historic site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house interpreted?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person interpreted?
2. Who sponsored it? representing which participant groups’s point of view? What was their position in the social structure when the event occurred? When the site went “up”?
3. What were the sponsor’s motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?
4. What is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to leave for us, today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?
5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government acquiescence?
6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political party? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?
7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?
8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today’s public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?
9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at this site?
10. How does the site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived ad events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?
Want to learn more about monuments? Check out my bookshelf.
Ready to Kill
by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.
Want more poems? Check out my monumental poetry section.