“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” — Donald Trump
There are few sources of information as essential to historians as statues. After all, without statues how are we to know anything about the past? The phrase “prehistory” derives from a German word meaning “periods of history that didn’t leave statues behind so who knows what happened?”
A statue can tell the historian that something happened, where it happened, and how the individuals involved looked while it was happening. Without statues to point to as clear, incontrovertible evidence, historians would find themselves faced with an impossible task. Thanks to statues, historians can confidently say that the two overarching themes of history are people standing in place and people riding on horses.
I remember clearly my first day working toward my Ph.D. (though, admittedly, there is no statue to commemorate it). My cohort mates and I sat in the seminar room awaiting the professor who would introduce us to the real work of doing history. I recall our thrill as the professor traipsed into the room in a dusty smock, hammer and chisel in hand, and declared in a booming voice, “Without statues there would be no history, and without history there would be no statues.” One classmate dared to ask, “But what about books and archival material?” That student did not last long in the department.
Thanks to statues, we can confidently say that the two overarching themes of history are people standing in place and people riding on horses.
Statues are the solid object around which any historian’s career is constructed. This is a lesson that is hammered home week after week in graduate departments across the world. Well do I remember a paper on which I had worked for a year being rejected by a conference. The paper’s flaw? I had failed to cite a single statue.
More recently, I had a meeting with my adviser, during which she advised me to think of a different dissertation topic, because “there isn’t a statue of this.”
Of course, there are some who ask: “Which came first, the history or the statue?” But those people are philosophers and you should probably ignore them.
And there are some who claim that statues are not ideal sources for historical information; they argue that statues present a valorized, one-sided account of history. This is obviously ridiculous. Everybody knows that statues allow you to see all sides, and that is because statues are three-dimensional objects. They permit an assortment of perspectives: You can look at a statue from the front, from the back, from the left side, from the right side, from below, from above, and from a variety of other angles.
Statues are history in its purest form. If a statue comes down it becomes impossible to know what happened in the past. Were it not for statues, how else would we know of the existence and significant achievements of important historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, or Rocky?
As historians, we must recommit ourselves to the defense of statues and champion a return to “statue-based” education, for skills like “looking at statues” have been devalued for too long.
And if a statue must go, we must do the next best thing: Build a statue of that other statue coming down lest the event be forgotten.
Zachary Loeb is a graduate student in the history and sociology of science department at the University of Pennsylvania.
