 Monuments are imposed on us. We have to react to them because they are imposed on us and they're really meant to be conversational. They're really meant to engage our senses. They're really meant to engage not only our intellectual intelligence but our emotional intelligence because if you go up to Lincoln Park and you look at the Statue of the Freedmen's Monument in which Abraham Lincoln is standing over a manumitted African-American almost in the sense of giving absolution to this guy. No artist in his or her mind today would ever try to pull that off. So what do we do with it? But at the same time that's a critical Lincoln monument because the monument was paid for by the African-American community. The money was raised for by former veterans of the Union Army who were black and by Freedmen. Now the interesting flip to that is they had no say in the design of the monument. They paid for it. They put the money in the trust of a group called the Western Sanitary Commission on St. Louis and the members of the Western Sanitary Commission who were white made the decision as to what the monument would look like. Monuments have stories embedded within them and the stories of the artists and the stories of the monuments themselves tell us a larger picture of who we are. Another example, Mount Rushmore. Arguably a great engineering monument. What it is? Well go ask Native Americans what they think about the four faces on the side of Mount Rushmore. Put up by Gutson Borglum who was a genius but was an incredible racist who had a particular vision of America. If you look at Borglum's papers I mean he has no problem using all kinds of euphemisms to besmirch various racial groups and ethnicities. It's ramping throughout his papers and yet he gives us this monument which is really becoming like the Statue of Liberty another kind of symbol about America but it has a different context when you look at it within the context of the man of the man who sculpted it. So these are things that I think speak to who we are as human beings and in speaking to us as human beings they allow us to look at the broader picture of American history. In many ways monuments serve to story scape. They tell us the story. They give us visual clues on the landmark. They give us visual clues on the landscape to tell our narrative and that's why I think they're wonderful and can be easily adapted into the classroom for teaching purposes and they're all over the United States.