Invisible Monuments (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Howard Mansfield | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

We don't look at most of the monuments and memorials around us. They disappear from view. Think of all the mute memorials you may pass in a week that are unseen, a blurred background to your daily commute: the green-mottled great man on his horse, hosting only pigeons; the curious obelisk looking like a stunted Washington Monument; the historical marker crowded with so many words it looks like a warning label written by a cadre of liability lawyers. So much narrative left out in the weather, so much storytelling that has lost its way.

• The forced invisibility of the African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which have been rediscovered. These graveyards were destroyed in keeping with America's "mortuary apartheid."
• The sad fate of the Irish immigrants building America's railroads in the nineteenth century, many killed on the job to be buried in unmarked graves.
• A grieving family's memorial to a son lost in World War II, built stone by stone on the family's farm, which still draws thousands to an outdoor "Cathedral of the Pines."
• A Ferris wheel, stopped forever after a tragic accident, abandoned to rust, which becomes a private monument for a five-year-old boy.
• A celebrated, much-pictured monument for the Battle of Bunker Hill that doesn't have the emotional charge and significance it once held.
• An unusual monument, a tribute to the future--a clock being built deep in a mountain, a clock that is meant to run for 10,000 years.
• And lastly, a monument hiding on museum walls. The great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, sometimes called the Hudson River School, weren't out to just paint pretty pictures. They were chasing a moment of insight when they would see this new nation clearly. Their paintings taught Americans how to see wilderness and laid the bounds for many of our national parks.