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Essay on How The Lincoln Memorial Architecture Makes People Feel
Historically, monuments have been erected by groups or nations to recognize a person, an ideal, an event, or a group of people. The normative function of a monument is to serve as a testament of social or national memory and to symbolize larger cultural, social, political, or national themes such as liberty, power, democracy, independence, justice, progress, equality, or patriotic valor. The power of a monument is in its commitment to serve the cause of memory and in the permanence of this commitment. Yet, it is precisely because of its fixedness in the landscape that, to those who see the monument, it becomes invisibly part of the landscape. National monuments in particular do not change daily, or even yearly; they only change through age (decade after decade) or in times of environmental, political, or social peril.
Historians interested in the place of the Civil War in American collective memory have focused great attention on monuments and memorials as public spaces in which the meaning of the conflict and its relationship to the nation's identity is stated and contested. Perhaps none has a more important place in American life than the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Designed between 1911 and 1912 by architect Henry Bacon and sculptor Daniel Chester French to symbolize the political unity and economic prosperity that Lincoln's war for Union made possible, the memorial's neoclassical grandeur has since provided a powerful setting for diverse groups of American to enact their own vision of American values. (Thomas, 2002)
African American leaders from the singer Marian Anderson in 1939 to civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 have claimed this symbolic location to construct much more inclusive and egalitarian understandings of Lincoln's legacy than the memorial's exclusively white, and largely elite, founders intended....
