Research Guides: Controversial Monuments: Home

Introduction

Welcome! This guide serves as a supplemental resource for the 2023-2024 First Year Book, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments by Erin L. Thompson. This guide will examine the ongoing debate of statue removal and destruction across the United States, including its history, public opinion, and additional contributing factors to the conversation. Resources provided include books, articles, videos, podcasts, and images.

To learn more about UMD's First Year Book program and the events for Smashing Statues, click here.

(Image Description: Monument of John B. Castleman in Louisville, Ky., removed on June 8. 2020.)

Pat McDonogh / The Courier Journal via Reuter

Smashing Statues

Erin L. Thompson is the author of the 2022 book, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments. She is an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice with a specialization in art crimes. Her first book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, explored the criminal underbelly of art looting and its underlying reasonings. Additionally, Thompson has written articles including Art from Guantánamo, Hobby Lobby's Antiquities Trouble, If we return Nazi-looted art, the same goes for empire-looted and Why People Collect Art.

(Image Description: Photo of Erin L. Thompson)

Smashing Statues by Erin L. Thompson
ISBN: 9780393867671
Publication Date: 2022-02-08
An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? And who gets to decide which ones should stay up and which should come down? Erin L. Thompson, the country's leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She traces the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, starting with the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom atop the US Capitol, and explores the surprising motivations behind such contemporary flashpoints as the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol. Written with great verve and thoroughly researched, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental question: Whose voices must be heard and whose pain must remain private?
Possession by Erin Thompson
ISBN: 9780300208528
Publication Date: 2016-05-24
A riveting account of private art collectors' passion from Roman times to the present Whether it's the discovery of $1.6 billion in Nazi-looted art or the news that Syrian rebels are looting UNESCO archaeological sites to buy arms, art crime commands headlines. Erin Thompson, America's only professor of art crime, explores the dark history of looting, smuggling, and forgery that lies at the heart of many private art collections and many of the world's most renowned museums. Enlivened by fascinating personalities and scandalous events, Possession shows how collecting antiquities has been a way of creating identity, informed by a desire to annex the past while providing an illicit thrill along the way. Thompson's accounts of history's most infamous collectors--from the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who stole a life-sized nude Greek statue for his bedroom, to Queen Christina of Sweden, who habitually pilfered small antiquities from her fellow aristocrats, to Sir William Hamilton, who forced his mistress to enact poses from his collection of Greek vases--are as mesmerizing as they are revealing.