Bernard and Irene Schwartz
Distinguished Speakers Series

Memorials, Monuments, and Statues 2020: What to Remove, What to Preserve, and What to Build?

Wednesday, August 19, 6 PM

In the resurgent national debate over history, memory and public statuary, Confederate monuments are now being removed—by governments and demonstrators alike—while a new reckoning has arrived for monuments to Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s founders, and Abraham Lincoln. How far should this re-appraisal go? Is the “new iconoclasm” an attempt to erase history, or a long-deferred acknowledgment that white supremacy has inflected public memory as surely as it has poisoned civic life? Allen C. Guelzo, Brent Leggs, Edna Greene Medford, and Harold Holzer (moderator) reflect on their own evolution in appraising this complex issue and discuss not only sculpture that is being torn down, but what might be built up in its place.

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