Yannick Trapman-O'Brien

Reading Excerpt; National Monument Audit

Added 2023-08-01 04:02:34 +0000 UTC

BEFORE YOU HIT PLAY - I've got an offer for you:

In 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the “Monuments Project,” a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.” As part of that effort, the Mellon Foundation commissioned Monument Lab to review almost half million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources to build and study a database of almost 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. Their resulting report is a rich, textured, deeply researched collection of thoughtful insight and recommendations.

Okay, here's my offer:

You want to have read this report. Maybe you will — after all it's only 38 pages, and the whole pdf can be downloaded free online. But maybe you desire to have read the report faces tension from your current time or focus for reading.

SO. I've pulled out some of the most attention grabbing results, findings, and factoids from this report - those are posted below. I've also excerpted a bit of the preface and the postscript of the report, which give necessary context to the findings - that's the audio above. If you agree to click play on that audio above, and just let that context happen, I'll agree to tell no one that you functionally paid some dude to clip the pictures out of a very smart book so you could skim through and just look at the colors.

Deal?

Deal