 We're going to look at a couple of monuments today, and I want to approach it from this idea of what is it telling us about the moment and the way that Americans were kind of struggling with their memory of a particular event. Think about them all. I mean, there will be a thousand people passing through air and space between 9 a.m. and 9 10 this morning. So in 10 minutes, that's a career's worth of people who may be getting all their history out of just going to those exhibits. The World War II Memorial, which we're going to visit in the afternoon, gets 4.4 million people per year. So in terms of shaping the way people think about events and history, this is really powerful stuff. And I think it's important to think about, well, who made this, and who are they making it for, and what were the circumstances under which this was put up, and why does it look the way that it looks? For my money, the one that we're going to look at first is the single best, most interesting, most fascinating memorial in the entire city, the Ulysses S. Graham Memorial. What makes it so interesting is that you can walk past it and only get a tiny, tiny piece of what's going on. You have to really study, you have to spend a little time kind of engaging the monument to kind of get the full experience. And one of the things that's so cool, we can talk about it as a piece of history. You can also talk about it as a piece of art. And this is one of the neater sculptures, both on this side and on the other side. The sculpture is so well done that if you walk around it, it almost seems to move. You see different things at different spots as you kind of make the semi-circle. So maybe we should start there. Just kind of start here. And just like we've been talking about images, music, all sorts of things that you can read closely. Look closely for the detail and figure out, try to figure out what's going on here. He's riding one of the horses. Yeah, each one. There's two riders up there. They both shot. Are they both shot? It looks like this guy's shot over here, he shot here. This guy's avoiding being shot just like these guys are ducking. They're using them as shields. All right, if you just look at it, if you're just standing here, for example, and you just take the most cursory look at it, what does it look like? I mean, if you only spend 40 seconds like most tourists, you take a shot from here and you move on, what do you get out of it? It's wagging going from one place to another. It's kind of the heroic, you know, it looks like a standard. The horse is rearing back. It's, you know, it's soldiers. It's kind of heroic. There's a guy leaning back. He's got the U.S. artillery flag. It looks like a pretty standard war memorial. When you take a little more time to look at it, what's going on? But what is it, first of all? We got a bunch of guys on horses. Yeah, OK, so it's it's it's horse drawn artillery. It's an artillery case on which is a period. It appears to be moving up to the front someplace. So everybody got that, right? What's going on? They're coming. They're under fire. I got stuck in the mud and cold suffering. And this guy looks like he looks like he's getting shot. OK, looks like they're avoiding being shot. OK, that's one way to interpret it. One thing, if they were close enough to the front that they were taking fire, the battery would probably be disengaged and wheeled in. So it would be rare to get that close. But everybody's kind of gotten the sense that it's in the process of crashing, right? I mean, let's go around to the other side. What's happening over here? From this side, you can definitely tell that it's more tilted, like the part where they're sitting. OK, so I mean, right, the axle is snapping. You can see, like, the slack in the tackle there. But notice, like, there's a lot of slack here. They're rearing up. It's in the process of crashing. I mean, look at the wheels, our akimbo. And I think what's happening here is not that these guys are getting shot, but the horses have reared. It's just at this moment. It's full of energy. It's just at this moment where it's about to crash. These guys, I don't know if they're ducking fire or if they're just tired in the back. I mean, especially this guy on the right. That is just exhaustion in his face. I mean, these guys have been on towing this thing around for months or years. But they're not even aware that in a four-tenths of a second, the momentum of the artillery case on is going to carry them into this huge mess of horse flesh. And these guys are trying to rein in the damage. But this is a picture of a crash about to happen. Think of how different that is from what you would normally see in a heroic military monument. This isn't a tribute to efficiency or a tribute to just the sheer power of the army so much as a kind of honest portrayal of how easy it is for things to go wrong. And especially like the guys riding in the back, like just the exhaustion there. And think about how atypical that is for a military monument. When do you think that this was put up? After granddad? Yes, when. So that would cover roughly 130 years. I was kind of amazed by it. I like that. Post World War I is a good guess. Why? Because we struggled with modern warfare there and lots of people came home and veterans of bears is good for them. That is a great guess, but not correct. And that's what's interesting about this. This is pre-First World War by like 20 years, which is really kind of unusual when you think of all the other Civil War statues that we've looked at. We looked at Stonewall Jackson, Superhero, Superman, steroids, muscles bulging. That's much more traditional. That's sort of heroic. He looks indestructible. He looks incredibly powerful. This is not indestructible. On the right, on the back, he's got both of his hands bracing him upon the other side. There's just kind of this sense of energy. And there's nothing that these guys can do. I mean, this is going to go very badly for them in a second or two. And there's a kind of resignation and exhaustion and a realism that is really unusual. You don't normally see a country putting up a military monument that depicts a crash. And I think it says something kind of interesting about where the nation was 25 years after the Civil War when they started putting this up here. How do we want to remember this event? How do we want? What are we going to put up? What are we going to show? How are we going to show it? Maybe like you were saying that when you really look at the war and teach it, you should look at the top side of it and don't glorify it and whatever you're saying. There's a struggle. It broke our country apart. I think that's exactly where we're going with this. There's even more interesting stuff on the other side. But think about how unusual that is. And it will become, I think, even clearer as we get to World War II, which does not have this kind of gritty realism to it.