Monumental

A new podcast from PRX, interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going.

Join host Ashley C. Ford and a team of independent producers in this 10-episode series where we confront the reality of what we have publicly celebrated and memorialized thus far, exploring big questions about the past, present, and future of our monuments. Episodes will be released weekly on Mondays over two seasons beginning October 30 through November 27, 2023, before returning in winter 2024.

Monumental is available free on-demand across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. An audio trailer is available now.

 

 

 

About

During moments of collective grief and triumph, Americans gather in public spaces to commemorate our shared history. In those places, we have built altars of stone, metal, and marble in tribute to our values, and we’ve placed our heroes on giant pedestals. But our monuments and memorials are also the site of flash points in our struggles with injustice. They can be  painful symbols of the many narratives and people left out of the American story. Once we learn the stories these objects tell about us, will tearing down statues and renaming schools be enough? 

Monumental interrogates the state of monuments across the country and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, audio journalists from around the country will piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the greater U.S. We’ll look at the commemoration of a racist massacre and the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history in North Carolina; we’ll learn about the creation of new statues depicting immigrant workers in Boston’s Chinatown, a city where the nation’s founders cast a long shadow. From the toppling of a contested Civil War monument in Santa Fe, to the statue of a voting rights pioneer tucked away in a government basement in Wyoming, Monumental will interrogate the personal and political costs of memorialization. 

Join our host, author and journalist Ashley C. Ford, as we travel across  the greater U.S. to learn what symbols are being challenged and remade in our public spaces, and how we undertake the monumental task of forging a new American identity - one that includes us all. 

Monumental is produced by PRX Productions, PRX’s award-winning creative studio specializing in audio storytelling. For more about the host and the team behind Monumental, visit our Team page. The series is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

 
 

Listen

 

E10: Bringing Monuments Home

Some monuments are larger than life. And they reinforce this idea that monuments are supposed to inspire awe and maybe even dwarf us. But what if a monument was human-scaled and made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold. In this episode, we travel to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to uncover how they took inspiration from Holocaust memorials in Germany to memorialize the horrific legacy of lynching in this country. And we look at decentralized memorials that are using technology to help bring monuments to the past into the future.

 

E9: Staring Down Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain Park is Georgia's most popular attraction, and its centerpiece is a massive rock carving that depicts three Confederate leaders who fought a Civil War over the right to own slaves and lost. It’s the largest Confederate monument in the entire world. The mere presence, let alone the popularity of Stone Mountain raises this question: If people can be oblivious or indifferent to something as big as that carving, then what about the rest of the nation that lives not only with monuments but with streets, bridges, buildings and schools named for the Confederacy? Confederate monuments have started coming down, but the struggle around what to do with Stone Mountain speaks to how difficult it can be to truly see and confront the stories being told all around us and tell the ones we need to hear.

 

E8: Hell Valley, Hawai‘i, USA

Pearl Harbor National Monument is the most visited place in Hawaii, and it’s one of two national sites recognizing a foreign assault on U.S. soil. The monument tells the story of the Japanese Empire’s sneak attack on the island of Oahu in 1941 and how the U.S. declared war on Japan and entered World War II the following day. But the U.S. government did something else that’s not often talked about: martial law was immediately declared in Hawaii, followed by the incarceration of men, women and children of Japanese ancestry. Just over ten miles from Pearl Harbor is the Honouliuli National Historic Site. It was Hawaii's largest and longest-serving World War II confinement camp, and it’s now being developed by the National Park Service as a new memorial space that will eventually be open to the public. It’s only when we look at Pearl Harbor and Honouliuli together – and see them as inextricably part of the same story – that we can reconcile who we Americans believe ourselves to be...with who we sometimes actually are.

 

E7: In NYC, A Tale of Two Monuments

The legacy of slavery in this country is undeniable. And yet we’re a long way from acknowledging how fundamental it is to how America came to be, and how it should be discussed and represented. Those tensions are playing out in our monuments - including in places we don’t often associate with slavery, like New York City. On Wall Street sits Federal Hall, a place dedicated to many firsts: the First Amendment, the first Capitol building and the first U.S. president. Less than a mile away is the African Burial Ground, dedicated to the 419 enslaved Africans buried there. Considered together, these two National Park Service sites illuminate how we talk about the birth of the United States, and the enslaved people who made this new country possible.

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E6: The Suffragist in the Basement

When it comes to women and monuments in the U.S., we seem to prefer mythical or allegorical women – think a lady in robes holding the scales of justice in front of a courthouse. It’s rare to see real women being honored for their actual accomplishments. But for decades, there was one statue in Wyoming that was an exception. Wyoming is known as the “equality state” because it was the first in the nation to pass women’s suffrage. And it recognized that history with a statue of Wyoming’s first Justice of the Peace and suffragist, Esther Hobart Morris, which stood outside the state Capitol building for 60 years. But today, that statue of Morris now lives underground in the Capitol basement. In this episode, we look at what the story of this one monument reveals about how women are mythologized and erased.

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E5: Whispers in Wilmington

We’re used to recognizing someone powerful with a statue. But what happens when there’s no statue or memorial to a traumatic event? Whoever lives with the impact of that painful history has to confront the kind of power it takes to keep it hidden for so long. In this episode, we uncover the story of the only successful coup d’etat ever to happen on American soil. This act of racial violence was designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That suppression involved racist mobs, as well as historians, city planners, journalists and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community’s onetime prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable.

 

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E4: Boston’s Tribute to Chinatown’s Everyday Heroes

Sometimes it’s hard to know which came first – monuments or the stories we tell about who and what is heroic. And for the powerful people who get to choose, it’s usually people who look like them. But what if the hero or the subject of a monument isn’t an individual but a group or a community? What does that kind of monument look like and how might it change how we see ourselves? In this episode, we look at how a new monument in Boston is honoring not just one momentous occasion or one notable person, but the wider legacy of the Chinese-American community and the generations of immigrant labor that helped build this country.

 

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E3: Monumental COnflict in Santa Fe

An obelisk called The Soldiers' Monument in downtown Santa Fe was erected after the Civil War to honor soldiers from Northern New Mexico who died fighting the Confederacy. But the monument also honors Union soldiers who fought “savage Indians,” – their scorched earth methods resulted in the systematic rape, enslavement, and forced relocation of thousands of Navajo and Apache people.

For decades, Indigenous activists had called for the obelisk to come down. In 2020 protestors tore it down, leaving only the monument's base. The backlash to its removal stoked resentment and misinformation from some Hispanic residents who blamed “wokeness” and liberal outsiders for erasing their heritage. Conflicts over the obelisk appear to be a culmination of longstanding tensions between the city’s Hispanic and Indigenous communities. But we uncover their roots in Santa Fe’s 400-year-old identity crisis - an identity built on colonialism, slavery, and mythology. Producer Ben Montoya looks at the city's choice now: to rebuild the past or pave a new future.

Additional audio was recorded with help from Ryan Thompson and Georgina Hahn. This episode was produced on the ancestral lands of the Tewa and Kumeyaay people. Special thanks to Dani Prokop, Arte Romero y Carver, Luis Peña, Gerard Martinez y Valencia, Rob Martinez, Autumn Gomez, Christina Castro, DezBaa, David Henderson, Alicia Guzman, Valerie Rangel, Estevan Rael-Galvez, Alma Castro, and Tod Seelie.

 

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E2: The Cult of Columbus

For generations, Christopher Columbus has been glorified in monument after monument across the United States. And while Columbus statues have recently started coming down, including in cities like Columbus, Ohio, the largest one in the world is standing tall - very, very tall… in a U.S. territory – the beach town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

In this episode, reporter and journalism professor Gisele Regatão travels to Puerto Rico and beyond to uncover the roots of Columbus’ glorification in U.S. history and why he came to be represented in so many public statues – even though he never actually set foot on the U.S. mainland. And she visits a community artist in Woodside, Queens who confronts the myth of Columbus by creating new monuments that celebrate immigrant stories.

 

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E1: Are Monuments Set in Stone?

Monuments are not immovable. What we commemorate, what we lift up, what story we tell as a nation has always been changing. How and why do monuments evolve and why are we tackling this now? We'll ask the difficult questions about the meaning they hold in our public spaces and our culture. We'll situate this series in the current movement to remove historically inaccurate or oppressive monuments, and look at how we memorialize today, from the collective outrage symbolized by George Floyd Square to the meditative urban waterfalls of the 9/11 Memorial. We’ll see how artistic responses to the “Emancipation Group”, the memorial depicting Lincoln freeing an enslaved man, can help us find new approaches to commemoration. And we'll introduce the National Monument Audit and the narratives we must challenge to move the monument conversation forward.

 

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Trailer

The landscape of public memory is shifting. As we re-examine the plaques in our parks and sculptures on our streets, we grapple with what to do with them. Once we learn the stories these objects tell about who we are, will tearing down statues and renaming schools be enough?

Monumental interrogates the state of monuments across the country and what their future says about our own. In this 10-episode series, host, journalist and author Ashley C Ford and a team of independent producers from around the country will piece together the complex stories behind some of the thousands of monuments that exist in every corner of the U.S. Listen to Monumental weekly on Mondays beginning October 30, 2023.

 

  • Coming soon

 
 
 

Team

 

Host - Ashley C. Ford

Executive Producer - Jocelyn Gonzales

Sr. Producer - Nancy Rosenbaum

  • Ashley C. Ford is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, published by Flatiron Books. Ford is the former co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, and the current host of Ben & Jerry’s Into The Mix. She currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy.

    Ford has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE Magazine, BuzzFeed, OUT Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Allure, Marie Claire, The New York Times, Netflix Queue, Domino, Cup of Jo, and various other web and print publications. She’s also developed special projects for companies like Medium.Com, Mailchimp Presents, Condé Nast Entertainment, and MasterCard. She's taught creative nonfiction at The New School in Manhattan, served as Ball State University’s Writer-In-Residence Fall 2021, and will be teaching the Creative NonFiction Workshop at Butler University in Spring 2023.

  • Jocelyn Gonzales is Executive Producer of PRX Productions. Previously, she was Executive Producer of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast. She produced the Popcast and Book Review podcasts at The New York Times for 10 years, and worked on podcasts for American Public Media, Hello Sunshine, Boston Globe Media and others. She has contributed reporting and production to radio outlets such as WNYC, Radiolab, Marketplace, Musicians Radio, and Minnesota Public Radio. She was an audiobook producer at Simon & Schuster Audio, mixed independent films and animated shorts, and worked in broadcast services at ABC Radio Networks. Jocelyn is a long-time faculty member of the Film and TV Department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and is a senior producer and engineer at Feet In Two Worlds, an award-winning non-profit journalism program focused on reporting in immigrant communities.

  • Nancy Rosenbaum is an award-winning podcast producer and documentary audio journalist based in Minneapolis. Most recently, she has been working as a contract producer to develop and launch new podcasts and public radio specials for Minnesota Public Radio, PRX and APM Reports. Her reporting has appeared on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and Here and Now as well as the BBC, The World and Latino USA. She has produced two feature-length audio documentaries about 20th century Minneapolis social history that have aired statewide on Minnesota Public Radio. Nancy got her start in public media as a staff producer for the renowned public radio program and podcast, On Being. Earlier in her career, she ran educational programs for youth and adults in New York City. For more information see www.nancyrosenbaum.com.

 

Sr. Editor - Rosalind Tordesillas

project manager - Edwin Ochoa

Episode 1 Producer - wonbo woo

  • Rosalind Tordesillas is an independent producer in New York City. She was born in the Philippines, trained and worked as a social scientist, and now explores human experience through audio storytelling. She produces and edits stories for radio and podcasts, focusing especially on immigrant life. Her work has been featured on Feet in 2 Worlds podcasts, The World and various PRX shows, as well as podcasts like Self Evident and Queens Memory.

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  • Wonbo is an independent journalist and producer based in New York. He was most recently executive producer of The Takeaway, the public radio show hosted by Melissa Harris-Perry, produced by WNYC Studios and PRX, and broadcast on more than 250 stations nationwide. He was previously an executive producer at WIRED, where he oversaw all video content and quadrupled both subscribers and views on the brand's YouTube channel. Before that, he worked at NBC’s Nightly News and for more than a decade at ABC’s Nightline and World News Tonight. He has won numerous awards for his work, including three Emmys and a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists. Wonbo was a Nieman fellow at Harvard from 2015-2016 and was a longtime faculty member at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

 

technical director - tommy bazarian

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Episode 2 producer - gisele Regatão

  • Gisele Regatão is a professor of journalism and podcasting at Baruch College in New York City. Before that, she worked at WNYC and KCRW public radio stations for almost 15 years. Originally from Brazil, she has done reporting about everything from an art fraud case in New York, to avocado production in Peru and Latino vote in the US. She has also produced two fiction podcast series, the most recent one for Radiotopia Presents, which received a Webby nomination.

Episode 3 producer - ben montoya

  • Ben is a freelance podcast producer and engineer from Santa Fe, NM. They've produced shows for Conde Nast, Audible, Vox, and Sonos as well as for small independent projects, universities, and an NPR-affiliate radio station. They love podcasts of all kinds and have worked on shows across a wide variety of different formats including audio-first documentaries, celebrity interviews, pop culture chat casts, and sound designed meditations. In addition to freelancing for various clients, they're also an Audio Story Editor at NYU's American Journalism Online graduate program.

 

Episode 4 producer - Heidi Shin

  • Heidi is a journalist, podcast producer, and writer. She’s especially interested in the stories of immigrant communities and the inevitable connections between stories abroad and our lives in the U.S. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, California Sunday Magazine, Snap Judgment, Atlas Obscura, The Queens Memory Project, 70 Million Podcast, BBC, WGBH, and PRI’s The World, amongst other outlets. Heidi also teaches about podcasting at the PRX Podcast Garage, Harvard University’s Sound Lab, and leads Boston’s Sonic Soiree.

Episode 5 Producer - Michael A. Betts II, MFA

Episode 5 producer - JOHN BIEWEN

  • John Biewin is a longtime journalist and producer now based at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where he produces and hosts the Scene on Radio podcast. Previously, John reported for NPR News, American Public Media, and Minnesota Public Radio. Scene on Radio’s 2017 series exploring the history of white supremacy, Seeing White, and its 2020 series on American democracy, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, were each nominated for a Peabody Award. Biewen is also a two-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for outstanding coverage of the disadvantaged. John is co-editor of the book, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Episode 6 Producer - Irina Zhorov

  • Irina is an award-winning journalist, reporting primarily on environmental issues. She's reported in the American West, in Russia, Puerto Rico, her native Philadelphia and currently works in the U.S. South. Her first novel, Lost Believers, was published in 2023.

Episode 7 producer - emily Nadal

  • Emily worked as a park ranger at different sites all over New York City. But after an internship with WNYC in 2019, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in journalism. She honed her audio skills at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism while freelancing with several outlets, focusing on the health and science beat. She graduated in 2021, then went on to become a digital content producer for radio station 1010 WINS, covering local news stories and building up the station’s digital platform. Now she’s a digital producer for Gothamist, another local news site, finding and telling stories of the underrepresented. When she’s not wrapped up in the news of the day, she’s probably cycling around the city or using those park ranger skills on a hike.

Episode 8 Producer - J Matt

  • J. Matt is a documentary photographer and feature-writer from, and based in, Honolulu whose work principally focuses on global warming and its intersections with place, ecology, and social, political, and economic histories. Represented by ZUMA Press, a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the National Press Photographers Association, their focus is on Hawai‘i and California as exemplary of what the nation faces in our new climate epoch.

 

Episode 8 Producer - Caroline Losneck

  • Caroline is a Maine-based independent radio and podcast producer, documentary filmmaker and installation artist. Her work has appeared on Maine Public Radio, Marketplace (APM), National Public Radio, KEXP, BBC, Kitchen Sisters (Radiotopia) and in podcasts, the New York Times, festivals and museums. Caroline has taught at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and she enjoys frequent collaborations with other artists. Often, she focuses her work on people who make a living on the ocean, artists and musicians, and movements for social justice. She is currently working on her first feature length documentary film.

Episode 9 Producer: Jess Jupiter

  • Jess is an award-winning podcast producer. She has worked with various companies to develop dynamic projects including HBO’s Lovecraft Country Radio and Netflix’s Okay, Now Listen. She co-directed and lead-produced the award-winning fiction piece His Saturn Return for Pineapple Studio’s The 11th series. Along with her commitment to being a joyful queer Black girl, Jess is just as committed to fostering and creating stories that expand the narrative of Black and queer communities and works to elevate stories by and for Black women.

Episode 10 Producer: Tamar Avishai

  • Tamar is an art historian and independent audio producer based in Cleveland, OH. She is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast The Lonely Palette, which aims to make art history more accessible and unsnooty, one object at a time. Tamar has produced podcast episodes in partnership with SFMOMA, the Harvard Art Museums, the Addison Gallery of American Art, Hi-Phi Nation, Open Source with Christopher Lydon, ParentData with Emily Oster, and others, and is the co-founder of Hub & Spoke audio collective. Since early 2020, she has been the podcaster-in-residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

 

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