Skip to main content
University of California Press

Monument Wars

Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape
by Kirk Savage (Author)
Paperback
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Jul 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 408
ISBN: 9780520271333
Trim Size: 7 x 10
Illustrations: 126 black-and-white photographs, 1 line drawing
Request an Exam or Desk Copy(opens in new window)RightsLink(opens in new window)Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., is “a great public space, as essential a part of the American landscape as the Grand Canyon,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger, but few realize how recent, fragile, and contested this achievement is. In Monument Wars, Kirk Savage tells the Mall's engrossing story—its historic plan, the structures that populate its corridors, and the sea change it reveals regarding national representation. Central to this narrative is a dramatic shift from the nineteenth-century concept of a decentralized landscape, or “ground”-heroic statues spread out in traffic circles and picturesque parks-to the twentieth-century ideal of “space,” in which authority is concentrated in an intensified center, and the monument is transformed from an object of reverence to a space of experience. Savage's lively and intelligent analysis traces the refocusing of the monuments themselves, from that of a single man, often on horseback, to commemorations of common soldiers or citizens; and from monuments that celebrate victory and heroism to memorials honoring victims. An indispensable guide to the National Mall, Monument Wars provides a fresh and fascinating perspective on over two hundred years of American history.

About the Author

Kirk Savage is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.

From Our Blog

#CAA2021: Browse Titles for Art History Courses

Explore our groundbreaking books that facilitate teaching across disciplines. To request an exam copy, click on “Request an Exam or Desk Copy” on the book page, and this will take you to our distributor's site where you can order your copy.The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Inter
Read More

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Monument to a Deceased Project
2. Covering Ground
3. The Mechanic Monster
4. Inventing Public Space
5. The Monument Transformed
6. The Conscience of the Nation
7. An End to War, an End to Monuments?
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Reviews

"A highly original and very important study of the monuments of Washington and their evolution over the past couple of centuries. . . . The book will make you go back to the National Mall, but you'll never again see it in quite the same light."
— Washington Post Book World
"By integrating political, art, and architectural history along with a geographic perspective on space and place, Savage has crafted an excellent and important contribution to our understanding of monuments and memorials, particularly those that represent national identity." 
— Journal of American History
"Savage asks important questions in Monument Wars: How can one stand apart from everyday experience to make public space match the extraordinary and authoritative events of our history? How do monuments in Washington retell the official story of the nation? How have the Mall and its monuments changed national history itself? This last question assumes a big claim, but after reading his compelling interpretation that offers a model for rereading cultural landscape anywhere, one is convinced of the power of that ceremonial landscape in our lives."
— Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
"A gifted writer, Savage is also a scrupulous cultural and social historian who writes with the political urgency of an engaged public intellectual. . . . a timely, engaging, and thoughtful book."
— American Historical Review
"Savage's discussion of memorial public art in Monument Wars is both impressive in its attention to historical detail and insightful in its analysis,"
— American Quarterly
"While his historiographic strokes may be broad, the prevailing themes Savage weaves into this telling of the more-than-two-hundred-year saga of the Mall's transformation produce a version at once deeper and broader than many of the narratives that have come before. Monument Wars is a work with much new to say, not only about the Mall specifically, but about variations in monuments' and landscapes' forms and meanings, both those intended by their makers and those made by their publics."
— Washington History
“Monument Wars offers an engaging chronological history of Washington.”
— Art Documentation
“While there has been a good deal of historical and descriptive writing in recent years about the National Mall and its countless monuments, such as the huge and controversial World War II plaza, Monument Wars by Kirk Savage is one of the few books to take on the larger significance of the development of these grounds and structures on the face of the national capital. And a fascinating book it is.”
— H-Net Reviews
“An indispensable guide to the National Mall.”
— Public Art Review
"A fascinating chronicle of the heart of America's national imaginary, the National Mall in Washington DC . . . Monument Wars offers its readers a history of U.S. nation building read through the lens of monuments in the nation's capital . . . a must read for everyone interested in American monuments, urban design, and national architecture."
— Amerikastudien / American Studies
“An exceptional book, Monument Wars is impressive in just about every way. It is an indispensable guide to the National Mall and establishes Savage as one of the foremost historians of American art now working.”—Alexander Nemerov, Yale University

“Monument Wars is the best single work I've read on the idea of the 'monument' in American culture, the best single analysis and history of Washington's shrines. In his rich and riveting analyses of the Washington Mall, Kirk Savage brilliantly re-animates its monuments with the stories of their often fraught and contentious origins. This is also a philosophical treatise on the paradox of lively American democratic ideals as they find fixed form in stone and mortar. Monument Wars is an outstanding achievement.”—James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge

“No one does art history and the history of memory as sublimely as Kirk Savage. In this book of extraordinary research and widely accessible prose, Savage brilliantly shows how America's most sacred and visible public space has evolved. He also demonstrates how the Washington Mall has become, for Americans, the preeminent space where the very idea of a monument has constantly changed. And above all, Savage writes with deep sensitivity about the sometimes tortured, always fascinating politics of national memory. The Mall appears monumentally fixed. But after reading Savage, no one will be able to gaze upon its stunning vistas without realizing that it is a turbulent, unsteady story of how a republic memorializes itself.”—David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“Kirk Savage maps Washington's ubiquitous monuments within the symbolic cityscape fashioned by the city's planners and rulers, creating a luminous, insightful record of our national political enthusiasms and obsessions. At once an art history of monuments and a landscape history of political theater, Monument Wars is a worthy successor to Savage's classic Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves.”—Dell Upton, University of California, Los Angeles

Awards

  • Outstanding Academic Title 2011, Choice, a publication of the American Library Association
  • J.B. Jackson Prize, 2012 2012, Foundation for Landscape Studies
  • J.B. Jackson Prize 2012, Foundation for Landscape Studies
  • Charles C. Eldredge Prize 2010, Smithsonian American Art Museum