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Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting
Paperback
ArchaeologyGeneral Political ScienceGeneral World History
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ISBN13: 9781804950005
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
Published: Aug 11 2026
Pages: 432
Language: English
The culture war is over--if you want it to be. It wasn't even a culture war, Dan Hicks argues; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, he shows, carried out through the weaponization of civic museums, public art, and even universities--and one with deeper roots than most imagine.
Tracing the origins of today's conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall connects the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human remains in museums--including the very one where Hicks himself is a curator.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, this sweeping narrative spans from the Yorkshire Wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford--revealing how militarism, slavery, racism, and white supremacy remain embedded in the heart of our cultural institutions.
Every Monument Will Fall is an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture--and how we can find hope, remembrance, and reconciliation in the fragments of a violent, unfinished past. Refusing the false choice between tearing down every statue or clinging to an unchangeable past, Hicks makes a compelling case for letting monuments fall when they must--and for rebuilding a culture of memory that truly reflects our times.
Praise for Dan HicksAn extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history, this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource. -- Paul Gilroy, founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL
Hicks's must-read book describes how it was possible for a human skull to be made into a drinking cup and used in a genteel Oxford college well into the 21st century, as if empire were an eternal state of nature... Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist, and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us--from statues to museums to the police. -- Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of White Sight
Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues--but so much more. It's about how we've been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others--or to understand ourselves better. -- Alice Roberts, bestselling author of Crypt
Dan Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why--in our patterns of thought, our institutions, and the built environment in which we live. -- Eyal Weizman, Director of Forensic Architecture
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