Lincoln Memorial Thesis

Creating monuments to memorialize the history of the United States should be heavily evaluated before action is made, for the impact on the country’s people is often greater than predicted. History is remembered and glorified through the creations of monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial as described by Kirk Savage. Therefore, it needs to be taken into consideration that the people and events chosen to be memorialized contribute to the perspective we have on the morality of these figures and their actions and once these monuments are created, our identity as a nation will consequently be affected depending on the construction of the monument. Evidently, these significances are oftentimes neglected when making said decisions.

The choice to

His argument focuses around the false religious aspect and the insensibility of it. The Lincoln Memorial is nothing but a representation of two speeches that have been published “ad infinitum” (Savage 2009). He makes the point that religiously respected things are often relics or direct artifacts, but that the Lincoln Memorial has nothing like that yet the monument makes the history is memorializes more “extraordinary and authoritative”. The monument was also made long after Lincoln’s era and death. The massive structure is nothing but that considering its anachronistic inaccuracy. This communicates how monuments have the power of glorifying history and creating some type of personal connection and community in our imaginations and just as well, these monuments can bring groups together that don’t have positive effects such as the neo-nazis and white nationalists that are empowered by confederate monuments like in Charlottesville, Virginia. This possibility needs to be considered prior to creating monuments; it being known that monuments have the power to bring people together, there needs to be some insight as to what type of people those are because the American identity depends on