 There's monuments there. I've used monuments really successfully in DC because I whenever I go any place I take my camera and I take pictures and we've got monuments to everything we've got monuments to politicians We've got monuments to war heroes, but we also have monuments like the one in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to newspaper boys We've got monuments in Lowell, Massachusetts in Manchester, New Hampshire to the mill girls We have monuments everywhere and anytime a monument is created whether it's in a small community Or on the grand stage of Washington DC. There's almost invariably problems with it because that monument means It may mean one thing to one person, but it may mean something entirely different to another person I think our monuments to the Civil War are a classic example of this You know after the Civil War monuments sprouted up both north of the Mason Dixon line and south of the Mason Dixon line To both Union heroes and Confederate heroes clearly One knows by looking at the record that it's true that the north won the war but the south won the peace in terms of the record of public memory But we're 25 years past the civil rights movement and now those monuments mean something else So what do those monuments mean? What do we do with these monuments? Do we tear them down? Do we take them take them apart? What do we interpret them? One of the more interesting monuments That I've worked with with my students is in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. It's the monument to Hayward Shepherd the Station baggage master who is a free black who was the first man to fall victim to John Brown and his raiders. It's a great ironic tale Raiders come in ostensibly to liberate the slaves lead a slave insurrection and the man they first shoot is a free black Well in the early part of the 20th century The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the sons of Confederate veterans raised a memorial to Hayward Shepherd It's a very controversial memorial because it's very paternalistic. It's loaded with racial Assumptions it it's really very Denigrating in some ways yet. We still have this and depending on the prevailing winds of time There have been times where the monument was boarded up because the park service didn't want anybody to see it and then there's been times when it's been out for the public to see And I think what the what the park service is finally settled on is we're going to interpret the monument as a marker of American memory It's it reflects a time and place in America that says more about the UDC and the sons of Confederate veterans Then it really does about Hayward Shepherd So monuments are great objects to teach the German word for monument is Denkmal which means thought object and you really have to engage monuments there they're meant to be encountered in the great artists understood how to get the people that were looking at the monument into the monumental space to view the monument and to Understand their place in terms of the money