Every Monument Will Fall

A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

Dan Hicks

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Hardback

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English

Hutchinson Heinemann
01 May 2025

History; Archaeology by period & region

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn't even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities - and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums - including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford - revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

By: Dan Hicks
Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 161mm, Spine: 48mm
Weight: 841g
ISBN: 9781529152746
ISBN 10: 1529152747
Pages: 592
Publication Date: 01 May 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. The author of eight books, he has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from the Times Literary Supplement to Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.

Reviews for Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

Hicks’ 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 see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. 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 and the police. -- Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of WHITE SIGHT and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt Every Monument Will Fall is an 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