Request the Monuments Database
The weekly “Monday’s Monument” feature on this website is being fed from a database we are compiling that currently contains 200+ monuments. If you’d like a copy of the database, drop us a line.
Peace & Justice Monuments
Since May, 2015, every Monday morning the peaceCENTER has been posting a little essay about a peace or social justice monument. For more than a decade, ever since the peaceCENTER was contracted by a national peace & human rights group to develop a workshop exploring strategies for creating memorials about acts of violence and injustice that did not glorify the bloodshed, we have pondered the relationship between the landscape and civic memory.
“I would rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the departed in the form of monuments.”
Alfred Nobel
As we showcase these monuments we hope you will join us in this exploration. For now, we’re concentrating on publicly accessible outdoor works (indoor art, museums and historic sites may come later . . . ) Some are grassroots and homespun; others, more complicated in their funding and execution. They all have a story to tell and we can learn from all of them.
MONDAY’S MONUMENT
Monday’s Monument: It Shall Not Be Again, Orange, Massachusetts
In 2000 this was designated as the official peace statue of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was dedicated on May 30, 1934 in Veteran's Memorial Park. On the front of the base is a bronze plaque with the relief sculpture of a mourning woman with her head and body...
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Monday’s Monument: Dove of Peace, Edmundton, Alberta, Canada
The Dove of Peace was designed and built to stand over the dais where Pope John Paul II stood to deliver his greetings and blessings during his visit in September of 1984. The frame of the structure originally included a white canvas tarpaulin covering to provide...
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Monday’s Monument: Freedom Monument, Los Angeles, California
A sculpture billed as "a crowd-supported and funded public monument to freedom, cultural diversity and inclusiveness" was unveiled in July, 2017 at a festival celebrating Los Angeles' diversity. The Freedom Sculpture in Century City was "inspired by the humanitarian...
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Monday’s Monument: La Paloma, Monterrey, Mexico
Could that building's color be enchilada red? San Antonio readers are probably disoriented by this photo. No, this is not the San Antonio Central Library. It is the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, designed by Ricardo Legorreta in 1991, the same year he won...
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Monday’s Monument: Resolution, Nicosia, Cyprus
Resolution (1995), by Cypriot sculptor Theodoulos Grigoriou, reiterates the faith of the city of Nicosia and its inhabitants to human rights as the only precondition to peace and freedom. On the round cement base, part of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human...
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Monday’s Monument: Ann Frank Human Rights Memorial, Boise, Idaho
The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial is a .81-acre educational park inspired by Anne Frank's faith in humanity. Built by the Idaho Human Rights Education Center, the privately funded memorial opened on Aug. 16, 2002, as a gift to the city of Boise. The 180-foot...
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Monday’s Monument: Canadian Tribute to Human Right Monument, Ottawa, Canada
The Canadian Tribute to Human Rights is a monumental sculpture designed by Montreal artist and architect Melvin Charney and unveiled by the fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1990. Standing over thirty feet high and constructed of red granite and concrete, the Monument's red...
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Monday’s Monument: Peace for All, Hatred for None, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
This monument was donated to the City of Windsor by Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamā’ and was unveiled on Windsor’s Riverfront on October, 20, 2017. It features four differently colored hands (representing diversity of culture and races) coming together to hold up a globe with a...
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Monday’s Monument: Ave Quiromantica, Malaga, Spain
The Ave Quiromantica is a bronze sculpture located on Calle Bolsa, Malaga, Andalusia, Spain. It is half pigeon and half an open hand, the whole sculpture resting on a marble base. It was based on a sketch done by the poet Rafael Perez Estrada, to whom the monument is...
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Monday’s Monument: Nordic Peace Monument, Morokulien, Norway & Sweden
In 1910 the Nordic Peace Congress in Stockholm decided that a peace monument should be raised on the border between Sweden and Norway to celebrate 100 year of peace between the countries. The building of the peace monument was finished in 1914. The design of the Peace...
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Monday’s Monument: Ann Chwazi Lapè, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
The Head of the UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), Sandra Honoré, unveiled a peace sculpture in the country's capital Port-au-Prince on September 28, 2017. The installation, which will remain at the National Police Academy, is called ‘Ann Chwazi Lapè’ (meaning ‘Let's...
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Monday’s Monument: Peace Candle of the World, Scappoose, Oregon
The Peace Candle of the World, also known as the Scappoose Peace Candle, is an approximately 50-foot-tall structure, built in 1971 outside what was then the Brock Candles Inc. factory, which burned down in 1990. The land was formerly a dairy farm; the candle was...
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Monday’s Monument: Stand Up, Speak Out, Westbury, New York
Stand Up, Speak Out was created in 1999 with the support of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) Long Island Chapter, Students Against Drunk Driving, and the Nassau County Traffic Safety Board. It received national attention due to its original placement at the Nassau...
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Monday’s Monument: Monumento à Paz Mundial, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Monument to World Peace is located near the entrance to the Santos Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro, the site of the 1992 Global Forum, a conference of non-governmental organizations held during the 1992 Earth Summit (formally known as the United Nations...
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Monday’s Monument: Dag Hammarskjöld Crash Site Memorial, Ndola, Zambia
Just after midnight on September 18th, 1961 a plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen others crashed, killing all aboard, outside of Ndola in what was then Rhodesia. The small plane was on the way to the Congo Republic to negotiate a...
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If you
haven’t read
this book,
you should!
Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site
In his book Lies Across America, Professor James Loewen posed these ten questions to ask at a historic site.
1. When did this location become a historic site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house interpreted?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person interpreted?
2. Who sponsored it? representing which participant groups’s point of view? What was their position in the social structure when the event occurred? When the site went “up”?
3. What were the sponsor’s motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?
4. What is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to leave for us, today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?
5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government acquiescence?
6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political party? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?
7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?
8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today’s public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?
9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at this site?
10. How does the site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived ad events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?
Travel across the United States in a 1965 Airstream Trailer as filmmaker Tom Trinley visits historic sites and monuments unveiling the many sides of history not told on the landscape or in history books. On-camera appearances by Howard Zinn, James Loewen, Lonnie Bunch and Adam “Fortunate Eagle” Nordwall. Inspired by “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “A Peoples’ History of the United States.”
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
By William E. Stafford
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
–William Shakespeare, from Sonnet 55
Listen to this song!
And we find it really hard to say we’re sorry
So the shadow of injustice still remains
We build monuments to those who died in battle
But we seldom speak of those who died in chains