Invisible Monuments (Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past)

We don’t look at most of the monuments and memorials around us. They disappear from view. Think of all the mute memorials you may pass in a week that are unseen, a blurred background to your daily commute: the green-mottled great man on his horse, hosting only pigeons; the curious obelisk looking like a stunted Washington Monument; the historical marker crowded with so many words it looks like a warning label written by a cadre of liability lawyers. So much narrative left out in the weather, so much storytelling that has lost its way.

Any monument that we stand before asks something of us. Think of monuments as the first part of a call and response, as in music, as in worship. We bring our sense of history to the present, otherwise the granite/marble/limestone/bronze before us will be mute.

A few monuments aren’t invisible. They speak to us, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and in another era, the Cenotaph in London that brought forth the strong emotional response after World War I. 

Each chapter explores the invisibility of monuments:

• The forced invisibility of the African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which have been rediscovered. These graveyards were destroyed in keeping with America’s “mortuary apartheid.”
• The sad fate of the Irish immigrants building America’s railroads in the nineteenth century, many killed on the job to be buried in unmarked graves.
• A grieving family’s memorial to a son lost in World War II, built stone by stone on the family’s farm, which still draws thousands to an outdoor “Cathedral of the Pines.”
• A Ferris wheel, stopped forever after a tragic accident, abandoned to rust, which becomes a private monument for a five-year-old boy.
• A celebrated, much-pictured monument for the Battle of Bunker Hill that doesn’t have the emotional charge and significance it once held.
• An unusual monument, a tribute to the future—a clock being built deep in a mountain, a clock that is meant to run for 10,000 years.
• And lastly, a monument hiding on museum walls. The great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, sometimes called the Hudson River School, weren’t out to just paint pretty pictures. They were chasing a moment of insight when they would see this new nation clearly. Their paintings taught Americans how to see wilderness and laid the bounds for many of our national parks.

The goal with these stories is similar to the landscape painters: the author refreshes our sight so we look anew at the monuments around us, and so we can engage in a call and response with our history.