Books like Smashing Statues — picked by fans

I was transfixed by Kelman’s story, masterfully, sympathetically narrated. It’s populated by few monuments, and the one squatting at the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is modest and understated. Here even the place of those dark events was in dispute.

Blending history with a gripping account of the struggle over public memory, and centering Native people, Kelman chronicles the modern search for the site (and meaning) of one of the most gruesome acts of government violence in American history, at Sand Creek, where U.S. troops slaughtered more than 150 peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho campers (mostly women and children) in November 1864.

The Colorado Pioneer Association commemorated (and glorified) the sordid event in 1909 with a Denver monument cataloging Sand Creek as a Civil War battle. But a search for truth and reconciliation would challenge and remake this public memory, and Kelman is an unrivaled guide in that process.

Monument Wars, like no other book I’ve read, explains the essence of the “monument”—what it is, what it’s supposed to do, and how it does it (or fails to do it)—in the context of American history.

Monuments freeze time and aspire to “closure,” setting heroes or momentous events and their meaning, literally, in stone. But our national lives and history do not stand still, and public memory thus changes with time, often with fraught consequences.

Savage brilliantly examines and illuminates this dissonance, focusing on the most important monumental space in the United States—Washington, D.C., and the National Mall.

Smart, surprising, and accessible, this account of the national capital’s contested terrain offers a vivid case study of how Americans remember, sometimes forget, and increasingly contest their past through sculpture, ceremonial landscape, and the theatrics of the built landscape.

The Unfinished Bombing was eerily prescient when first published in 2001 and remains uncannily relevant today.

Linenthal set the standard in his analysis of public tragedy, its impact on an American community and the larger nation, and its memorialization.

In April 1995, a white homegrown right-wing terrorist bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men, women, and children. Linenthal’s story of the massive crime, outpourings of grief, and the efforts to memorialize the dead and prevent future cataclysms is gripping and personal yet academically astute.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum that rose from the rubble is among the most culturally and aesthetically successful monuments in the history of American public memory. Though seemingly eclipsed by the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, this story of rupture and recovery, so well told by the author, continues to be critical and instructive.

Civil War statues have long been the gold standard for America’s monumental public landscape.

They are the public sculptures and architectural features we are now rediscovering, sometimes with horror, and arguing over, after years of mute service as park furniture and pigeon roosts. Brown’s book is a definitive history of these classic, heroic monuments.

Beautifully written, perceptive, and illuminating, it explains their history, offering readers an engaging and invaluable background and context for understanding how and why they were erected, and how they’ve not only reflected American culture but have propelled it, particularly (as the title suggests) towards militarization and the affirmation of racial and class hierarchies.

Reading Civil War Monuments focuses our view on monumental things all around us that we’ve never really seen.

This book is an intensive examination of "Rhodes Must Fall" – a student-led movement that erupted in South Africa in 2015 to protest the persistence of the legacies of apartheid more than two decades after its formal end.

The movement called for the removal of a statue of settler colonist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town as a metaphor for the dismantling of these legacies.

I love the book because while it is written in solidarity with the movement’s aim to dismantle white supremacy, it is also deeply attentive to how easily a politics of decolonisation can be misdirected at other marginalised groups – in this case, Black migrants from outside South Africa, who have frequently been at the receiving end of xenophobic violence.      

Written by a world-leading authority on iconoclasm, this book is a veritable encyclopedia!

I love its historical sweep, covering iconoclasm from ancient Rome to the present day. The book also ranges widely across geographies, including Europe, West Asia, South Africa, and the United States. In doing so, it makes clear how, rather than being characteristic of particular cultures, iconoclasm is rooted in the human psyche.

It helped me to understand how human beings can experience the inert matter of statues and images as coming alive, to the point where they are spooked enough to want to destroy them.  

In contrast to stories of statue toppling that we encounter in the West in recent years, India has witnessed a frenzy of statue building of political and religious figures over several decades.

This book is the most theoretically sophisticated account of this phenomenon. It situates statue-building in India in its historical and political context, developing an account of "iconopraxis" – the use of icons to assert and consolidate community identity and presence in the public sphere.

I love Jain’s attention to the material lives of statues, which she elucidates through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors. The book wonderfully complicates the distinction between the religious and the secular, demonstrating how this is blurred in India’s many monumental statue assemblages.     

From the title of this book about "so-called Australia," it’s clear that we are going to hear a deeply subversive account of the politics and history of that country from an Aboriginal perspective.

In addition to providing a powerful critique of colonial narratives about white settler "discovery" that remain dominant in Australian public culture, the authors curate a rich archive of Aboriginal disruption of those narratives.

These have taken the form of not only statue protests of the kind that we have seen in other parts of the world, but also art, music, films, mock ethnographic documentaries, counter-memorials, and more. The book shows how another history of the continent has always been narrated, even if settler audiences have lacked the literacy necessary to understand it.  

Controversial Monuments and Memorials was published the year after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which saw whites rally around the monument to Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus. This event, and the murders of nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC in 2015, hastened public discord with symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy. Allison’s book was the first to step into the space where scholars, museum staff, and community activists came together to examine how monuments were used as tools for systemic racism as well as progressive social change. The book is a great resource for those looking to enter the conversation about controversies surrounding monuments and memorials in the United States.

I loved the author’s conversational style, which made me feel as if I was accompanying him on his journey to Revolutionary War sites. I also enjoyed the way he presented events, his witty commentary, and the way he made people of the past come alive.

Another aspect of this book that I thought was great was how the author showed that American victory in the fight for independence wasn’t a sure thing—one different decision here or one minor mistake there could have completely changed the outcome.

Even though I’m very familiar with the people and events of this era, the author’s fresh approach meant that I was never bored when I read this book.