Week 9: Public Displays of History: Monuments
The issue that strikes me most about the Glassberg and Levinson readings for this week is the way in which the meaning of a monument changes over time and across groups. The WWI monument in Orange, MA documents one monument and the changes/differences in the community’s attitudes toward it. From the beginning the intentions of why and what the monument should mean was different between the veterans and the peace proponents. Glassberg’s chapter documents these changes from the commissioning to the mid-90s. I found Glassberg’s examples clear and compelling and overall feel the chapter does exactly what it sets out to do: show how monuments become important to communities by allowing disparate groups to find compatible meanings which change as time passes. Value is truly in the eye of the beholder.
The Levinson book, Written in Stone, presents several examples of how communities deal with changing attitudes toward monuments: placing plaques with new/updated descriptions and explanations over old/politically incorrect messages from the past; moving the offensive pieces to museums or to less prominent locations; etc. The New Orleans monument to the overthrow of the ‘carpetbag government’ was especially interesting as it presented an example of preserving the ‘history, warts and all’ (p. 102). Surely, the incident being memorialized was rightfully hateful to modern African Americans living in New Orleans today, yet a compromise was reached where the piece was preserved in situ (or nearly so). Not completely satisfying to those it offends, I’m sure, but preserved in a location attached to its original significance nonetheless.
This all leads back to the memory versus history line of thought we’ve been following all semester. Each group defines the meaning of the monument in a way that is significant and satisfying to its own vision of self. So the WWI veterans approve the statue because it shows them as an integral part of the community especially with regard to educating the children and the peace group sees the same statute as an indictment of war by believing the soldier to be teaching the evils of combat. Both examples of group memory or interpretation both partially historically accurate but neither representing total historic truth.
I also enjoyed the fact that Glassberg investigated the history of the Massachusetts monument in depth. The fact that Veterans of American Legion post would build a distictly anti-militarist monument is surprising, and shows the interesting complexity that an in-depth history can bring to almost any topic.
ReplyDeleteCan total historic truth ever be represented? That would seem to require that the entire human experience be represented and I'm not sure that is possible either. Monuments seem to be something that is almost incompatible with the new way of doing history, but I think multiple monuments can help bring a pluralist narrative.
ReplyDeleteProbably not. There's no way to ever account for, let alone pass on, every nuance of an historical event. But I think that's what historians strive for and working toward a goal of total truth is the only way to move toward that truth.
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