Monday’s Monument: Memorial To Beacon Fires, Mt Maunganui, New Zealand
To celebrate peace at the end of World War I, the Boy Scouts proposed lighting beacon fires across the British Empire. The idea was inspired by the words of Sir Edward Grey on August 3, 1914, who looked out of his window in London at dusk and remarked: “The lamps are...
Monday’s Monument: Hand of Peace, Barnard’s Green, England
Rose Garrard was commissioned in 1998 to create this sculpture to draw attention to an existing commemorative stone on a war memorial site in Barnard’s Green, which was neglected and regularly vandalized. She researched and developed the designs in consultation with...
Monday’s Monument: A Grande Mão, São Paulo, Brazil
"The Big Hand" was designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1989 as the focal point of the the Latin America Memorial (in Portuguese, Memorial da América Latina), a cultural, political and leisure complex. This large hand is perhaps a nod to his mentor Corbusier’s open...
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: World Wars Missing Soldier Monument, Vácrátót, Hungary
Mátyás Horváth, President of the Vácrátót Traditional and Village Conservation Association, noted that "Vácrátót actually has no monument to the heroes of World Wars I and II, so the leadership of the village would like to commemorate them in this way." This monument...
Monday’s Monument: Dag Hammarskjöld Crash Site Memorial, Ndola, Zambia
Just after midnight on September18th, 1961 a plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen others crashed, killing all aboard, outside of Ndola, in what was then Rhodesia. The small plane was on the way to the Congo Republic to negotiate a...
Monday’s Monument: Battle of Nashville Peace Monument, Nashville, Tennessee
The Ladies Battlefield Association commissioned Italian artist Guiseppe Moretti for this monument, dedicated on Armistice Day 1927, to all those who fought during the 1864 Battle of Nashville. The marble obelisk and angel were destroyed in the tornadoes of 1974; the...
Monday’s Monument: Universal Links on Human Rights, Dublin, Ireland
This sphere of welded interlinked chains and bars, 260 cm (about 8.5 feet) in diameter, houses an eternal flame in its center, powered by natural gas from the Kinsale Head gas field. It was commissioned by Amnesty International in 1995 and designed by Tony O'Malley....
Monday’s Monument: Straße der Menschenrechte, Nuremberg, Germany
The Way of Human Rights was opened on 24 October 1993. It is sited on the street between the new and old buildings of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, connecting Kornmarkt street and the medieval city wall. Created by Israeli artist Dani Karavan it consists of a gate,...
Monday’s Monument: Women’s Memorial, Brockville Ontario, Canada
The Women's Memorial was dedicated on November 18, 2010 at the Brockville Arts Centre during an unveiling ceremony entitled "Voices of Hope," a community celebration to end violence against women. The base of the monument is engraved: "This Memorial is dedicated to...
Monday’s Monument: MexikoPlatz, Vienna, Austria
In 1956 Vienna renamed Erzherzog-Karl-Platz (Archduke Karl Square) as MexikoPlatz, and erected this memorial commemorating Mexico's condemnation of the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria to make a “Greater Germany”) in March, of 1938, the only country in the League...
Monday’s Monument: A Simple Act of Kindness, Columbus, Georgia
As the story goes, in 1883 a young woman working at the Eagle and Phenix textile mill got her skirt caught in a piece of machinery. It tore the lining of her skirt and her life savings, which she had sewn into the lining for safety, tumbled out onto the factory floor....
Monday’s Monument: Monument aux Morts, Château-Arnoux, France
This monument represents a man breaking his sword on his knee; behind him, a woman is weeping. At the top, a globe is surrounded by an olive branch. The monument was installed in 1928 at the intersection of two national roads. When the crossroad became too...
Monday’s Monument: Mahomet Weyonomon Memorial, London, England
In the garden of Southwark Cathedral there is a sculpture commemorating the burial of Mahomet Weyonomon, a chief, or Sachem, of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut, who had come to London to seek justice for his people. British settlers had taken lands belonging to the...
Monday’s Monument: Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park, Cincinnati, Ohio
The Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park, completed in 2003 in what was wasteland along the Ohio River just east of downtown, is an award-winning display of sculpture and flora representing five continents and also featuring a riverside bike trail and...
Monday’s Monument: Scales of Justice, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Bernalillo Courthouse has a major kinetic sculpture by artist Evelyn Rosenberg entitled "The Scale of Justice". Installed in 2003, this computer-controlled sculpture transfers water from side to side every six minutes. At the base are inscriptions depicting human...
Monday’s Monument: Justice, Winnipeg, Canada
Created by local artist Gordon Reeve, the work was one of four public art pieces commissioned as part of the building of the new Law Courts in 1984. Consisting of three ribs or legs, the sculpture is topped by three long arms, each taking a different serpentine form....
Monday’s Monument: Children’s Holocaust (Paper Clip) Memorial, Whitwell, Tennessee
In 1998 a Whitwell Middle School History class discussing World War II learned that six million Jews were slaughtered in the Nazi camps. A student asked how big six million is; another student read that people from Norway wore paperclips as a symbol of resistance...
Monday’s Monument: Letelier-Moffitt Monument, Washington, DC
On September 21, 1976, on Sheridan Circle, a car driven by Orlando Letelier, an outspoken opponent of Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, exploded The explosion killed Letelier and his passenger and colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. It was caused by a remote...
Monday’s Monument: Monumento de la Paz, Caracas, Venezuela
The Monument for Peace was erected by Dr. Farid Mattar in 1963 as an ecological monument and a tribute to recycling. Constructed only with stones and leftovers from construction sites all over the city of Caracas, each stone was placed, according to Mattar’s own...
Monday’s Monument: Bertha von Suttner Statue, Bonn, Germany
The 2.50 m high stainless steel sculpture was placed on Bonn's Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz on the initiative of the Women's Network for Peace and dedicated on September 21, 2013, the International Day of Peace. It is the work of Finnish sculptor Sirpa Masalin. On the...
Monday’s Monument: Magna Carta Monument, Runnymede, England
The American Bar Association (ABA) came to visit Runnymede in the 1950s and was surprised to find no official memorial to the Magna Carta. After discussion with the local authority and the National Trust, the idea of an ABA sponsored memorial was initiated, and Sir...
Monday’s Monument: Statues on the Facade of the Museo Polifacético Rocsen, Nono, Argentina
Forty nine statues occupy niches on the facade of the Museo Polifacético Rocsen (Rocsen Multifacted Museum) in Nono, Córdoba Province, Argentina. As the museum's founder, Juan Santiago Bouchon, explained: "I represented an "Evolution of Thought" beginning with the...
Monday’s Monument: Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
Built between 2004 and 2006, the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation (also known as the Palace of Peace and Accord) represents all of the world’s religious faiths and houses educational facilities, a national center for Kazakhstan’s various geographical and ethnic...
Monday’s Monument: Beatitude Statues, Detroit, Michigan
Life-size bronze figures of eight contemporary people at the Solanus Casey Center at the Saint Bonaventure Capuchin Monastery represent the Beatitudes of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3–11.) Each of these individuals has shown through their life and...
Monday’s Monument: Play for Peace, Chicago, IL
Installed in September, 2018 by artist Jeffrey Breslow outside his studio in Chicago's Fulton Market, this 13 foot by 12 foot metal sculpture features nine colorful life-size silhouettes of kids at play. The children symbolize hope for a peaceful world. The text...
Monday’s Monument: Gaspar Yanga Statue, Yanga, Mexico
Gaspar Yanga was a member of the royal family in Gabon prior to being kidnapped and enslaved, working in the Veracruz sugar plantations. He is widely considered to have established one of the first free black settlements in North or South America. Yanga founded the...
Monday’s Monument: Haymarket Memorial, Chicago, Illinois
This statue in Haymarket square is the culmination of more than a century grappling with the meaning of the Haymarket Riot. On May 4, 1886, a labor rally near Chicago’s Haymarket Square turned into a riot after someone threw a bomb at police. At least eleven people...
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.