Monuments and Sites Day

There is something humbling about standing before a monument. A statue, a battlefield, a plaque on a stone wall—these are not merely markers of time gone by. They are memory cast in bronze, reverence etched into marble, and sometimes even remorse embedded in rusting steel. They tell stories. They prompt questions. And for many, they carry meaning that no modern textbook or digital archive can ever replicate. Yet today, these very monuments are under siege—not just by the passage of time or the wear of weather, but by ideologies that would rather erase history than understand it.

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The International Day for Monuments and Sites, observed each year on April 18, was created in 1982 by ICOMOS and endorsed by UNESCO in 1983. Its purpose was clear and noble: to raise awareness of the world’s cultural heritage, its beauty, its vulnerability, and the need to preserve it. In a world that often trades permanence for progress, it is a reminder that some things deserve to endure. Not because they are perfect, but because they are true.

This year’s theme, Heritage Under Threat from Disasters and Conflicts, could not be more timely. From war zones where terrorists target ancient ruins to city councils tearing down statues in the dead of night, history is being systematically chipped away. The official materials from ICOMOS speak of floods and earthquakes, but there are other disasters—those of the political kind. The kind where historical context is cast aside for modern outrage. The kind where complex legacies are simplified into slogans and hashtags. The kind where nuance dies, and with it, understanding.

This is not just an international problem. It is an American one. In cities across this nation, monuments have become battlegrounds in a culture war over memory. To some, a statue of a general or a founder is a painful symbol. To others, it is a vital piece of the American story. The danger is not in the discomfort. It is in the belief that discomfort must lead to demolition. Monuments are not endorsements. They are records. They are artifacts. They are teachers. To destroy them is to silence the conversation rather than enrich it.

Historian Allen Guelzo, in his landmark course Making History: How Great Historians Interpret the Past, reminds us that history is not just what happened. It is how we remember what happened. He calls it the second question. The first is, “What is that?” The second, and more important one, is, “Where did it come from?” Monuments help us ask—and sometimes wrestle with—both. They anchor us in the uncomfortable but necessary tension between pride and shame, between greatness and guilt. They are, quite literally, carved reminders that we did not get here easily, nor do we remain here by accident.

From Herodotus to Thucydides, from the grandeur of Livy to the harsh realism of Tacitus, the great historians understood that remembering was not just about celebration. It was about caution. It was about continuity. Livy looked to Rome’s past with admiration, but also sorrow. He feared, even in his day, that the moral fiber of the Republic had frayed. Tacitus, with a sharper tongue, showed us what happens when a society loses its virtue and forgets what made it strong. These men would not have supported the removal of memory. They would have demanded we confront it.

There is a reason tyrants, both ancient and modern, burn books and blow up statues. The fastest way to control a people is to control their memory. The destruction of monuments in the Middle East by ISIS was not collateral damage. It was targeted annihilation of identity. Secretary of State John Kerry called it one of the greatest assaults on shared human heritage in a generation. When you erase a people’s monuments, you erase their story. And when you erase their story, you can write your own in its place.

That is why preservation matters. That is why this day matters. And that is why, as conservatives, we must lead the charge in defending monuments—not just as relics, but as reminders. To walk the grounds of Gettysburg, to stand beneath the shadow of Mount Rushmore, or to run your fingers along the bullet-pocked walls of Independence Hall is to engage with history on its own terms. These are not just places to visit. They are places to learn. Places to remember. Places to pass down.

We must teach our children to understand, not sanitize. We must give them the tools to interpret, not the permission to ignore. That means embracing complexity. It means acknowledging that some of our heroes were flawed, and that some of our villains were men of their time. It means teaching that history is not a morality play with clear-cut villains and heroes, but a human story—messy, proud, broken, resilient.

Last year, I stood on the riverbanks where the town of Hamburg, South Carolina once stood—a place erased not just by time, but by intention. In the sweltering summer of 2023, I walked the patch of land where the Hamburg Massacre took place on July 4th, 1876. There are no markers there. No solemn memorials for the dead. Just a bridge, a bronze plaque honoring someone else entirely, and the fading whisper of a tragedy most Americans have never heard of.

That day, armed Black militia members—authorized by the Republican governor—marched through Hamburg to celebrate the centennial of American independence. Their presence was seen as a threat. Confrontation followed. And by the end of it, several Black men were murdered by white “Redeemers,” political militants determined to restore white Democratic rule in the South by intimidation and bloodshed. No one was ever held accountable. No one stood trial. The very ideals of liberty and equal protection under the law, enshrined in the 15th Amendment, were trampled in the dust that July.

And yet, the only physical monument to come from that day is not at the site of the massacre. It is over a mile away in John C. Calhoun Park in North Augusta—a memorial not to the victims, but to Thomas Meriwether, the lone white man killed in the melee. It calls him a “martyr,” but says nothing of the other names—Allen Adaway, Albert Maynard, Moses Parks, and others—men whose only crime was believing they were free.

That monument is a perfect example of what some might call “bad history.” It distorts the truth. It omits the full story. But it should not be torn down. It should be understood. Because monuments like that, as painful as they are, still teach us something crucial: what a society chooses to remember—and what it chooses to forget. You do not defeat lies by erasure. You defeat lies by exposure. By context. By truth.

I looked at that monument, and I felt no reverence. But I did feel resolve. We need monuments to all of it—the noble, the tragic, the complex, the wrong. If the Hamburg Massacre teaches anything, it is that the past is never really past, and memory—however buried—always finds a way back to the surface. The task now is to tell the full story. And that starts with preserving the physical pieces of our history, so that future generations are not left with myths, but with meaning.

So this April 18, let us not just mark a day. Let us mark our commitment—to history, to truth, to continuity. Let us visit a monument. Let us learn its story. Let us tell it forward, even if it is hard. Because if we lose our monuments, we lose the map. And if we lose the map, we are left wandering, without compass or conviction, in a world that no longer knows where it came from.