The officials who document and care for our inherited monuments have no shared definition or central system for tracking, maintaining, or understanding them. This point cannot be overstated. The confusion over what a monument is spurs bureaucratic and social turmoil, as we scramble to remember locally and collectively with disparate tools and objectives. Because conventional monuments are often viewed as one-offs, solitary symbols in a given location, it can be difficult to consider them as a set of linked symbols, sites, and stories across jurisdictions. Generally, however, monuments across locations have been shaped by those with the time, money, and officially sanctioned power to craft and elevate the past in their own image.
Monument Lab defines a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public.” We formed this definition through tens of thousands of conversations over the last decade in public spaces across the country.1 We heard how people think of monuments as statues in bronze and marble on pedestals, and how those conven- tional structures also misrepresent history and fail to do justice to our collective knowledge and experience. Through these con- ersations, we learned that monuments do more than just help us remember—they make our society’s values visible. They also can push us to recognize the ideas that could never be captured or rendered in stone. History does not live in statues. History lives between people. Monuments are not endpoints for history, but touchstones between generations. Throughout our work, we believe that by advancing greater understandings of the expansive role and ever-changing nature of monuments, we can yield fuller possibilities for civic power and public memory.
For the National Monument Audit, produced in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Monument Lab looked at a large-scale trove of this nation’s monument data to create a sprawling snapshot of the commemorative landscape. The audit is meant to inform Mellon’s landmark Monuments Project, a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.”
To produce the audit, our research team spent a year scouring almost half a million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. We looked for those sites and structures we most conventionally think of as monuments – statues or monoliths constructed with stone or metal, installed or maintained in a public space with the authority of a government agency or institution. For our deepest investigations, we focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments represent- ing data collected from every US state and territory. This study set allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our monument landscape, to pose questions regarding common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory.