Public monuments across the United States and its territories predominantly represent white men, glorify war and conquest, and distort U.S. history, a report from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Monument Lab finds.

Conducted as part of the foundation's $250 million Monuments Project, the National Monument Audit (37 pages, PDF) analyzed approximately fifty thousand conventional monuments — defined by Monument Lab as "a statement of power and presence in public" — from every U.S. state and territory, selected from half a million records of historic properties maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and public sources. According to the study, monuments routinely have undergone modifications — ranging from addressing disrepair or damage, to the addition of names, plaques, or wreaths, to large-scale renovations — as well as relocation and removal.

Of the top fifty most represented individuals in the data set, 88 percent were white men, 50 percent enslaved other people, 40 percent were born into family wealth, and 76 percent owned land. The top fifty figures include only three women and five Black or Indigenous individuals: Martin Luther King Jr. (ranked fourth), Harriet Tubman (twenty-fourth), Tecumseh (twenty-fifth), Sacagawea (twenty-eighth), and Frederick Douglass (twenty-ninth), and no U.S.-born Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people. The analysis also found that the most common features found in U.S. monuments were war and conquest, outnumbering peace thirteen to one. A third (33 percent) of the monuments in the data set and 45 percent of those on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorate wars, while only 9 percent mention veterans, and while 5,917 monuments mention the Civil War, just nine represent post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The report also found that, as specific types of monuments are constructed within particular political, social, and cultural contexts, the current monument landscape misrepresents U.S. history and often serves to perpetuate inequalities and injustices. For instance, the dedication of Confederate monuments surged between 1900 and 1920, during the rise of Jim Crow. Similarly, 56 percent of monuments that mention "pioneer" were built after 1930, as part of a popular culture myth-making around the frontier and "Wild West" that diminished the forcible removal of many Indigenous communities through armed conflict and land dispossession.

To address those findings, the report's authors call for building a new, deeper understanding of how monuments live and function in communities, examining the forces that drive their installation and upkeep in relation to civic power and reflecting on how and why they evolve over time; supporting a profound shift in representation to better acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of U.S. history; reimagining commemoration by elevating stories embedded within communities that foster repair and healing; and engaging in a holistic reckoning with monumental erasures and lies and move toward a monument landscape that acknowledges a fuller history.

"We understand that the more durable monuments do not best represent American history, but are instead the result of the most abundant material resources and hegemony in its many forms: racial, ethnic, religious, gender-based," wrote Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander in the report's foreword. "We see that the monuments standing on our streets or in our parks have not stood there for time immemorial. Our built environment is in motion; it always has been in motion....The National Monument Audit calls us all to do our part to change our commemorative landscape and to better capture the multivocality of our country in our public spaces."

(Photo credit: Karyn Olivier, The Battle is Joined, Mike Reali/Mural Arts Philadelphia)