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

“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”—Guy Davenport, poet, translator, critic, and author of The Death of Picasso and The Geography of the Imagination

We live in an era of monument building, yet 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.

Some monuments do elicit a strong emotional response even after many decades. Why do these work, when others don’t?

Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.

Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation as he seeks to understand the soul of American places. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Bones of the Earth, The Same Ax Twice, Chasing Eden, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, and In the Memory House, which The New York Times called “a wise and beautiful book.”

In his previous book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II, Mansfield “breaks through the wall of silence some war veterans maintain,” said Booklist. “The result is an impeccably researched and beautifully written . . . history of all that is left unsaid in the aftermath of war and how that affects the next generation.”