Recently featured in Lapham’s Quarterly, an excerpt of Andrew Shanken’s The Everyday Life of Memorials. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full excerpt. A sampling appears below:

“In 1947 Lord Chatfield, who was admiral of the fleet and president of the War Memorials Advisory Council in England, argued that ‘though to us the two wars are twenty-five years apart, time will close the gap until they are looked back on as one great struggle against evil.’ In commemorative practice, if not in consciousness, wars have run together. The congestion of wars has made assemblage practical, whether as groupings of memorials or by means of additive plaques. Perhaps this is the most appropriate way to acknowledge more than a century of continuous warfare.”