monumentalization

“You have to understand your history and make sure that you tell your history in its full richness, good and bad. But there is a distinction between history and monumentalization. Buildings are monuments — they’re symbolic and they’re powerful statements of what an institution is about.”

With the University of Virginia President Edwin Alderman giving the statue’s dedication before several Confederate memorial groups, the ceremony represented a partnership between the state university and national organizations of the Confederacy in the monumentalization of the Lost Cause.