The landscape of public memory is shifting. As we re-examine the plaques in our parks and sculptures on our streets, we grapple with what to do with them. Once we learn the stories these objects tell about who we are, will tearing down statues and renaming schools be enough? Monumental interrogates the state of monuments across the country and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, host, journalist and author Ashley C. Ford and a team of independent producers from around the country will piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S. Listen to Monumental weekly on Mondays beginning October 30, 2023. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions, PRX’s award-winning creative studio specializing in audio storytelling. For more about the host and the team behind Monumental, visit our website. The series is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Monuments are not immovable. What we commemorate, what we lift up, what story we tell as a nation has always been changing. How and why do monuments evolve and why are we tackling this now? We'll ask the difficult questions about the meaning they hold in our public spaces and our culture.

We'll situate this series in the current movement to remove historically inaccurate or oppressive monuments and look at how we memorialize today, from the collective outrage symbolized by George Floyd Square to the meditative urban waterfalls of the 9/11 Memorial. We’ll see how artistic responses to the “Emancipation Group”, the memorial depicting Lincoln freeing an enslaved man, can help us find new approaches to commemoration. And we'll introduce the National Monument Audit and the narratives we must challenge to move the monument conversation forward.

Monumental is produced by PRX Productions, PRX’s award-winning creative studio specializing in audio storytelling. For more about the host and the team behind Monumental, visit our website. This series is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

For generations, Christopher Columbus has been glorified in monument after monument across the United States. And while Columbus statues have recently started coming down, including in cities like Columbus, Ohio, the largest one in the world is standing tall - very, very tall… in a U.S. territory – the beach town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

In this episode, reporter and journalism professor Gisele Regatão travels to Puerto Rico and beyond to uncover the roots of Columbus’ glorification in U.S. history and why he came to be represented in so many public statues – even though he never actually set foot on the U.S. mainland. And she visits a community artist in Woodside, Queens who confronts the myth of Columbus by creating new monuments that celebrate immigrant stories.

An obelisk called The Soldiers' Monument in downtown Santa Fe was erected after the Civil War to honor soldiers from Northern New Mexico who died fighting the Confederacy. But the monument also honors Union soldiers who fought “savage Indians,” – their scorched earth methods resulted in the systematic rape, enslavement, and forced relocation of thousands of Navajo and Apache people.

For decades, Indigenous activists had called for the obelisk to come down. In 2020 protestors tore it down, leaving only the monument's base. The backlash to its removal stoked resentment and misinformation from some Hispanic residents who blamed “wokeness” and liberal outsiders for erasing their heritage. Conflicts over the obelisk appear to be a culmination of longstanding tensions between the city’s Hispanic and Indigenous communities. But we uncover their roots in Santa Fe’s 400-year-old identity crisis - an identity built on colonialism, slavery, and mythology. Producer Ben Montoya looks at the city's choice now: to rebuild the past or pave a new future.

For more resources related to this episode, visit the episode page on www.prx.org/monumental

Additional audio was recorded with help from Ryan Thompson and Georgina Hahn. This episode was produced on the ancestral lands of the Tewa and Kumeyaay people. Special thanks to Dani Prokop, Arte Romero y Carver, Luis Peña, Gerard Martinez y Valencia, Rob Martinez, Autumn Gomez, Christina Castro, DezBaa, David Henderson, Alicia Guzman, Valerie Rangel, Estevan Rael-Galvez, Alma Castro, and Tod Seelie.

Sometimes it’s hard to know which came first – monuments or the stories we tell about who and what is heroic. And for the powerful people who get to choose, it’s usually people who look like them. But what if the hero or the subject of a monument isn’t an individual but a group or a community? What does that kind of monument look like and how might it change how we see ourselves? In this episode, we look at how a new monument in Boston is honoring not just one momentous occasion or one notable person, but the wider legacy of the Chinese-American community and the generations of immigrant labor that helped build this country.

We’re used to recognizing someone powerful with a statue. But what happens when there’s no statue or memorial to a traumatic event? Whoever lives with the impact of that painful history has to confront the kind of power it takes to keep it hidden for so long. In this episode, we uncover the story of the only successful coup d’etat ever to happen on American soil. This act of racial violence was designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That suppression involved racist mobs, as well as historians, city planners, journalists and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community’s onetime prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable.

When it comes to women and monuments in the U.S., we seem to prefer mythical or allegorical women – think a lady in robes holding the scales of justice in front of a courthouse. It’s rare to see real women being honored for their actual accomplishments. But for decades, there was one statue in Wyoming that was an exception. Wyoming is known as the “equality state” because it was the first in the nation to pass women’s suffrage. And it recognized that history with a statue of Wyoming’s first Justice of the Peace and suffragist, Esther Hobart Morris, which stood outside the state Capitol building for 60 years. But today, that statue of Morris lives underground in the Capitol basement. In this episode, we look at what the story of this one monument reveals about how women are mythologized and erased.

The legacy of slavery in this country is undeniable. And yet we’re a long way from acknowledging how fundamental it is to how America came to be, and how it should be discussed and represented. Those tensions are playing out in our monuments - including in places we don’t often associate with slavery, like New York City. On Wall Street sits Federal Hall, a place dedicated to many firsts: the First Amendment, the first Capitol building and the first U.S. president. Less than a mile away is the African Burial Ground, dedicated to the 419 enslaved Africans buried there. Considered together, these two National Park Service sites illuminate how we talk about the birth of the United States, and the enslaved people who made this new country possible.

For more on the show, visit prx.org/monumental.