p. 23 “Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. Two days later, John Hancock sent a copy to Washington, asking the general to read it aloud to his army in New York. Washington received the broadside on 8 July. He gathered his troops at the common (now City Hall Park) the following evening at 6pm…An excited crowd headed down Broadway to George III’s statue. The crowd included perhaps 40 or so soldiers (and sailors) led by Captain Oliver Brown, as well as the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary party that had been responsible for the anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Accounts differ as to how many civilian New Yorkers joined in or spectated. The protesters climbed the fence, attacked ropes to the statue and pulled it off its plinth… Special humiliations were reserved for George II’s severed head. John Montresor was a loyal British captain in New York at the time… sent a man to steal it from the tavern and bury it. Later, her dug it up. “I rewarded the men, and sent the head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed country.”
p. 27 “The images of the mob as a manifestation of American heroism bore striking similarities to those of Black Lives Matter protesters pulling down statues in 2020. When that happened, two famous paiontings of the pulling down of Geroge III’s statue were turned into memes. William Walcutt’s 1857 version was overlaid with text that reads “July 9 1776: After hearing a reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, New Yorkers ‘Destroy History’ by toppling a statue of King George II. And that’s why no one know who won the American Revolution”.
p. 29 William, Duke of Cumberland… “ a man who was once celebrated with statues, flowers and song, yet whose reputation fell fo far that in 2005 historians voted him the ‘Worst Briton’ of the whole 18th century.” Culloden “commenader ordered ‘no quarter’ be given to injured or fleeing Jacobites, or to any civilians, including women and children, who were unfortunate enough to live nearby.. thousands of wounded soldiers and ordinary people were murdered in a spree of vengeance. Some were executed by firing squad. Others were burned alive in buildings or clubbed to death.”
p. 31 “By May 1746, people were beginning to ask why, if Cumberland had won such a decisive victory, there were so few Jacobite prisoners in British prisons. Tobias Smollett, then a surgeon in London, published his first poem shortly after the news of Culloden reached the capital. Entitled “The Tears of Scotland”, it was a haunting evocation of what we would now define as war crimes: “when the rage of battle ceased,/The Victor’s soul was not appeased;/ The naked and forlorn must feel/ Devouring flames, and murdering steel.” Cumberland acquired a new nickname, “The Butcher”. An engraving of the time showed him, dagger in mouth, using his bare hands to skin a Highlander alive.”
p. 37 “In 1868, the 5th Duke of Portland took Cumberland’s statue down from its plinth in Cavendish Square. The official explanation was that its lead body had deteriorated badly, and required restoration or possibly a full recasting. This was probably true, though it may not have been the only reason. The Portland estate promised Cumberland’s statue would be back soon. It has not been seen since.”
p. 38 In 2012, the equestrian statue of William, Duke of Cumberland, reappeared on its plinth. It was a replica made of soap, installed by the Korean artist Meekyoung Shin. … In addition to Shin’s comment on the changeable nature of historical memory, her statue’s sent recalled Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1. Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, hallucinates bloodstains on her hands that she cannot scrub off.”… Cumberland’s scummy remains were finally scraped off his plinth in 2016.”
p. 55 while Stalin projected political power with his monuments, Rafael Trujillo projected sexual power as well.. ruled the Dominican Republic for three horrific decades… a sadist, a torturer and a murderer…by the time of his death in 1961, there were 1,800 public statues and busts of Trujillo, roughly one for every 27 km2 of land… built his power upon appropriating national wealth, business and industry, and on horrific violence. His regime’s violence was so stylized that some historians have described it as theatrical. .. He created an atmosphere of terror by humiliating both his favourites and his enemies… Random disappearances were common… He was said to throw the mangled bodies of his enemies to the sharks. In 1937, he ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of black people, presumed to be Haitians. An estimated 17,000 to 35,000 people were beaten or hacked to death with clubs and machetes over the course of two to five days. Officers had been ordered not to waste bullets on Haitians.”
p. 60 The Monument to the Peace of Trujillo was dedicated in 1955, proclaimed the ‘Year of the Benefactor’ by Trujillo to mark a quarter century since he had come to power. The celebrations were termed the ‘Free World’s Fair’. Trujillo – while running a vicious dictatorship himself – curries favour with the United States by posing as a champion of freedom and enemy of communism.”
p. 62 “Successive administrations had tolerate and even supported Trujillo. Now, though, Eisenhower’s government was worried about Castro’s administration in Cuba. It hoped to build an international consensus against Castro, but was struggling to do so – because Latin America widely considered Trujillo to be much worse.”
“resistance was growing inside the Dominican Republic – and part of that was due to four young women known as the Mirabel sisters. Patria, Dede, Minerva and maria Teresa Mirabel were part of the anti-Trujillo underground. … In November 1960, three of the sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, were ambushed in their jeep and beaten to death. The jeep was pushed off a cliff in an unconvincing attempt to make the deaths look like an accident… Eisenhower sent emissaries to persuade the dictator to step down, offering him asylum in the United States,, In early 1961, a new president, John F Kennedy tried again. Kennedy was told ion February that the CIA was arming revels in the Dominican Republic.”
p. 90 “The African American journalist and politican George Washington Williams travelled to Leopold’s domain in 1890, and was horrified by what he saw. He wrote an open letter to Leopold detailing failures and brutalities committed in the name of the Congo Free State, including the enslavement, torture and murder of Congolese people… found that existing language was inadequate to describe what he had seen. He had to invent a new term for what Leopold was doing – “crimes against humanity” – which was later used to describe the Nazi holocaust, and is now part of international law.”
p. 91 “Outrage spread across the world and was picked up by writers including Mark Twain, Booker T Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Felcien Cattier of the Uniersity of Brussels investigated in the late 1890s and early 1890s, concluding that it was “the clear and indisputable fact that the Congo Free State is not a colony in the proper sense of the term; it is financial speculation.” Its only purpose, Cattier said, was to make money for Leopold.”
p. 213 In recent years, there have been movements in Britain and the United States to raise more statues of women and people of colour. These campaigns are no doubt well meant, but they do not address the fundamental problem that statues represent the Great Man theory of history. Supplementing Great Men with a few Great Women represents a cosmetic change, not a meaningful change, in how we think about history… Statutory itself is the problem. It’s didactic, haughty and uninvolving. In the modern world, its links with the history of tyranny and racism are regrettably strong.”
p. 215 “The Monument to the Laboratory Mouse in Novosibirsk, Russia, honours those mice that have (involuntarily) contributed to scientific research, with a bronze statue of one in spectacles knitting a DNA double helix. The statue of Charles La Troke at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is upside down, balanced on its head with the plinth in the air – because the scultpro thought universities should turn ideas on their head. One of the few political statues that Londoners treat with genuine affection is the ‘Allies’ sculpture of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a public bench in New Bond Street… It invites visitors to sit between Churchill and Roosevelt and interact with them in any way they like.”
p. 216 “A symbolic moment such as pulling down a statue may have resonance. What it does not do – at least, not by itself – is actually change anything. Pulling down a statue does not create liberation.”
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