We don't look at most of the monuments and memorials around us. They disappear from view. Think of all the mute memorials you may pass in a week that are unseen, a blurred background to your daily commute: the green-mottled great man on his horse, hosting only pigeons; the curious obelisk looking like a stunted Washington Monument; the historical marker crowded with so many words it looks like a warning label written by a cadre of liability lawyers. So much narrative left out in the weather, so much storytelling that has lost its way. Any monument that we stand before asks something of us. Think of monuments as the first part of a call and response, as in music, as in worship. We bring our sense of history to the present, otherwise the granite/marble/limestone/bronze before us will be mute. A few monuments aren't invisible. They speak to us, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and in another era, the Cenotaph in London that brought forth the strong emotional response after World War I. Each chapter explores the invisibility of monuments: The forced invisibility of the African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which have been rediscovered. These graveyards were destroyed in keeping with America's "mortuary apartheid." The sad fate of the Irish immigrants building America's railroads in the nineteenth century, many killed on the job to be buried in unmarked graves. A grieving family's memorial to a son lost in World War II, built stone by stone on the family's farm, which still draws thousands to an outdoor "Cathedral of the Pines." A Ferris wheel, stopped forever after a tragic accident, abandoned to rust, which becomes a private monument for a five-year-old boy. A celebrated, much-pictured monument for the Battle of Bunker Hill that doesn't have the emotional charge and significance it once held. An unusual monument, a tribute to the future--a clock being built deep in a mountain, a clock that is meant to run for 10,000 years. And lastly, a monument hiding on museum walls. The great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, sometimes called the Hudson River School, weren't out to just paint pretty pictures. They were chasing a moment of insight when they would see this new nation clearly. Their paintings taught Americans how to see wilderness and laid the bounds for many of our national parks. The goal with these stories is similar to the landscape painters: the author refreshes our sight so we look anew at the monuments around us, and so we can engage in a call and response with our history.
Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation, very often set in the Monadnock region. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Bones of the Earth, The Same Ax Twice, Chasing Eden, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, and In the Memory House, which The New York Times called "a wise and beautiful book." In his previous book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II, he "breaks through the wall of silence some war veterans maintain," said Booklist. "The result is an impeccably researched and beautifully written . . . history of all that is left unsaid in the aftermath of war and how that affects the next generation." Mansfield has been honored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council as "a gem in our granite landscape" and by the Ruth & James Ewing Arts Awards. He has won a gold medal for Commentary for City and Regional Magazines, a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was a City and Regional Magazine Feature Story Finalist. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Franklin Pierce University. He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and has co-written a forthcoming documentary film. He lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.
