Monday’s Monument: Ensemble pour la Paix et la Justice, Lyon, France
This sculpture, Together for Peace and Justice, by Xavier de Fraissinette, is in the Parc de la Tête-d'Or in Lyon. It was given to the city to commemorate the G7 conference which was held there in June, 1996. The seven figures represent the G7 nations (Canada, France,...
Monday’s Monument: The Sphere, New York, New York
The Sphere was commissioned by the owner of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in 1966. Sculptor Fritz Koenig started work in 1967 in his barn in Bavaria, while the WTC was in the planning stages, and finished it four years later in...
Monday’s Monument: Freedom Rider’s National Monument, Anniston, Alabama
Established on January 12, 2017, one of President Obama's last acts as president, Freedom Riders National Monument shares stories of people and places that gained national attention in the fight against the injustices of Jim Crow laws and eventually led to regulations...
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: Slave Market Memorial, Stone Town, Tanzania
The Slave Memorial in Zanzibar, Tanzania, recalls how slaves were once held in underground chambers until sold in the nearby slave market. Swedish sculptor Clara Sönäs produced the work in 1998. The chains are real historical artifacts. The slave trade shifted to East...
Monday’s Monument: Slave Trade Marker, Camden, New Jersey
Dedicated in November 2017, the Slave Trade Marker, located in a small park where the waters of the Delaware River once flowed, is a cast-iron sign proclaiming in large gold letters the weight of America’s original sin: “Enslaved Africans Once Sold Here.” More than...
Monday’s Monument: Unsung Founders Memorial, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The Unsung Founders Memorial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is located in McCorkle Place, one of the University’s quads. The memorial is a black granite tabletop supported by 300 bronze figurines and surrounded by 5 black stone seats. The...
Monday’s Monument: Brown University Slavery Memorial, Providence, Rhode Island
In 2003 Brown University undertook a study of the university’s relationship to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The findings of the three-year study showed that slavery and the slave trade were pervasive throughout Rhode Island; Rhode Island dominated the North...
Monday’s Monument: Ethics of Peace, Washington, D.C.
This sculpture was installed in 2000 in a courtyard at Georgetown University Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. According to the artist, Michael Alfano, ethics means the study of ideal conduct. To that end, the sculpture tries to provide a model for the ideal conduct...
Monday’s Monument: Government of the People, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
This statue, by Jacques Lipchitz, was commissioned by the City of Philadelphia to fulfill a public art requirement in what is now called Thomas Paine Plaza, in front of the new Municipal Services Building across from City Hall. In 1972 it was in Italy, awaiting...
Monday’s Monument: The Arts of War and the Arts of Peace, Washington, D.C.
The Arts of War and The Arts of Peace are bronze statue groups on Lincoln Memorial Circle in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.. Commissioned in 1929 to complement the plaza constructed on the east side of the Lincoln Memorial as part of the Arlington Memorial...
Monday’s Monument: Apotheosis of Democracy, Washington, DC
Apotheosis of Democracy is on the United States Capitol House of Representatives portico's east front in Washington, D.C. The pediment's center focal point is the figure of allegorical Peace, which is dressed in armor and is depicted protecting Genius. Leaning against...
Monday’s Monument: Indelible, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Installed on the south side exterior of Philadelphia’s Independence Visitor’s Center in 2003, Alison Sky’s Indelible is a site-specific, narrative work intended to create awareness about American history that has gone undisclosed. The artwork is a stucco relief of a...
Monday’s Monument: Jose W. Diokno Statue, Manila, Philippines
In September 2017 the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines unveiled a statue of the late human rights lawyer Jose "Pepe" Diokno, appointed by President Corazon Aquino as the founding chairman of the country's watchdog agency against rights abuses and...
Monday’s Monument: Thomas Paine Statues, US, England and France
Thomas Paine, philosopher of the American and French Revolutions, author of “Common Sense,” has been a controversial figure when it comes to monuments. In 1942 a Paine statue was proposed for Fairmount Park in Philadelphia but the idea was shot down because his book...
Monday’s Monument: Mary Dyer Statue, Boston, Massachusetts
A Quaker at a time when Quakers were banned from Massachusetts, Dyer was eventually hanged for her insistence on religious liberty in the English colony. The statue by Sylvia Shaw Judson went up in 1959 at a descendant's bequest. It's diagonally across from the Boston...
Monday’s Monument: Joseph Sturge Memorial, Birmingham, England
A memorial to the English Quaker, abolitionist and activist Joseph Sturge (1793–1859) was unveiled before a crowd of 12,000 people on 4 June 1862 at Five Ways, Birmingham, England, near his former home. Sturge is posed as if he were teaching, with his right hand...
Monday’s Monument: Henry Richard Apostle of Peace Statue, Tregoron, Wales
Henry Richard is chiefly known as an advocate of peace and international arbitration, having been secretary of the Peace Society for forty years (1848–84). He is less widely known for his other interests, especially his anti-slavery work. The statue was dedicated in...
Monday’s Monument: Elihu Burritt Memorial, New Britain, Connecticut
Elihu Burritt was known as the "Learned Blacksmith." He lectured throughout New England about the joy of learning, then turned his attention to humanitarian causes for which he is famous: the abolition of slavery, the dignity of the American working man, and the cause...
Monday’s Monument: Holocaust Memorial, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The monument was dedicated on July 17, 1994, in remembrance of the killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is set upon a base of six black granite Stars of David which represent the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. A central...
Monday’s Monument: The Pit, Minsk, Belarus
The Pit (Belarusian: Яма) is a monument devoted to the victims of the Holocaust. It is on the site where, on March 2, 1942, the Nazi forces shot about 5,000 prisoners of the nearby Minsk Ghetto. The small polished black granite obelisk was created in 1947 and in 2000...
Monday’s Monument: Memorial to the Six Million, Johannesburg, South Africa
Memorial to the Six Million in Johannesburg’s Westpark Cemetery pays tribute to the Jewish men, women and children who lost their lives during the Second World War. The monument depicts six bronze fists, each five feet high, bursting out of the ground as a protest...
Monday’s Monument: Bells Monument, Sofia, Bulgaria
The Bells Monument (or, in Bulgarian, “Камбаните”) is in a park at the base of the Vitosha mountain. An inscription at the monument’s base reads, “Children of the future accept the eternal, fiery call of immortality - Unity, Creativity, Beauty.” When the UN declared...
Monday’s Monument: Tree of Hope, Marseille, France
L’arbre de l’espérance sculpture stands at the main entrance to the 26th centennial park in Marseille and was unveiled in 2000 as part of the 2,600 anniversary of the foundation of the city. 350,000 people of all faiths and none, native to Marseille or immigrants...
Monday’s Monument: Multicultural Man Builds the World, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
The sculpture sits on Trg Oslobođenje – Libertion Square – in the center of Sarajevo. It consists of a naked male figure reaching toward the sky, pulling the meridians of the earth together. Around him, doves help by lifting further meridians into place. The...
Shaheed Minar (Language Martyrs Monument), Dhaka, Bangladesh
The Shaheed Minar (Bengali: শহীদ মিনার Shohid Minar lit. "Martyr Monument") commemorates those killed during the Bengali Language Movement demonstrations of 1952 in what was then East Pakistan. On 21 and 22 February 1952, students from Dhaka University, Dhaka Medical...
Monday’s Monument: Martyred Intellectuals Memorial, Dhaka, Bangladesh
The Martyred Intellectuals Memorial (Bengali: বুদ্ধিজীবি স্মৃতি সৌধ) was built in memory of the martyred intellectuals of the Bangladesh Liberation War. The cornerstone was laid in 1991. On the night of 14 December 1971, over 200 of East Pakistan's intellectuals...
Monday’s Monument: Reunification Monument, Yaoundé, Cameroon
After WW I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Cameroon, a German protectorate, was divided into two regions and put under French and British rule. In January 1960, French Cameroon became independent, British Cameroon, 10 months later. In 1972 the two...
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. 5
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.