The National Monument Audit, produced by Monument Lab in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, assesses the current monument landscape across the United States.

Monument Lab’s research team spent a year scouring almost a half million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. For our deepest investigations, we focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. The National Monument Audit allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our monument landscape, to pose questions about common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory. The National Monument Audit is meant to inform Mellon’s landmark Monuments Project, a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.”

Foreword
by Elizabeth Alexander, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Preface
by Paul M. Farber, Sue Mobley, and Laurie Allen, Co-Directors, National Monument Audit, Monument Lab
Next Steps
by Paul M. Farber, Sue Mobley, and Laurie Allen, Co-Directors, National Monument Audit, Monument Lab
This list includes individuals with the most public monuments in the United States. The list was determined with ordinal ranking and based on available monument records. For a full methodology, see the Process section.
1. Abraham Lincoln (193)
2. George Washington (171)
3. Christopher Columbus (149)
4. Martin Luther King Jr. (86)
5. Saint Francis of Assisi (73)
6. Robert E. Lee (59)
7. Casimir Pulaski (51)
8. Benjamin Franklin (48)
9. John F. Kennedy (44)
10. Thomas Jefferson (36)
11. Ulysses S. Grant (35)
12. Stonewall Jackson (33)
13. Jefferson Davis (30)
14. Marquis de Lafayette (30)
15. Andrew Jackson (27)
16. Theodore Roosevelt (27)
17. William McKinley (27)
18. Joan of Arc (26)
19. Nathan Hale (24)
20. William Shakespeare (24)
21. José Marti (23)
22. Thaddeus Kosciuszko (22)
23. William Clark (22)
24. Harriet Tubman (21)
25. Tecumseh (21)
26. Alexander Hamilton (20)
27. Junípero Serra (20)
28. Sacagawea (20)
29. Frederick Douglass (19)
30. Martin Luther (19)
31. Jacques Marquette (18)
32. Dwight Eisenhower (17)
33. Franklin D. Roosevelt (17)
34. Anthony Wayne (16)
35. Merriweather Lewis (16)
36. Simón Bolivar (16)
37. Robert L. Burns (15)
38. St. Paul (15)
39. Washington Irving (14)
40. William Penn (14)
41. George Rogers Clark (13)
42. John Marshall (13)
43. John Sullivan (13)
44. Nathan Bedford Forrest (13)
45. Oliver Hazard Perry (13)
46. Sam Houston (13)
47. Daniel Boone (12)
48. David Glasgow Farragut (12)
49. James Garfield (12)
50. John Logan (12)
This search interface allows you to explore the 48,178 data records that make up the National Monument Audit “study set.” We retrieved and analyzed data records from 42 data sources created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and affinity organizations. These data sources were included because they provided publicly accessible digital records about a wide range of cultural and natural objects. A large part of the work of the Audit was accessing, converting, parsing, and mapping that data into a single, normalized dataset and identifying records representing monuments. The study set does not include every monument in the United States.
Documenting a Global Uprising through Protest Art in the Streets
by Heather Shirey and David Todd Lawrence, Co-Directors, Urban Art Mapping
Archiving Toward Liberation: The Toppled Monuments Archive Collective
by Jillian McManemin, Toppled Monuments Archive
Christopher Columbus: WE NEVER WANTED HIM HERE
by Catherine D'Ignazio, MIT Data + Feminism Lab
Keep the Risk-taking Going
by Jane Golden, Mural Arts Philadelphia
A Hawaiian Perspective on Monuments
by Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu
Keynote
September 29

Join Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Dr. Paul Farber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, for a discussion that will dive into Monument Lab’s findings and explore what they mean for the future of our commemorative landscape.
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Data
Webinar

September 30

Join Monument Lab for a deep dive into monument data. We will explore methods from the audit and other monument tracking projects, as well as themes in monument record keeping and the legacies and limitations of cultural heritage data.
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Educators
Roundtable

October 4

Join Monument Lab for a roundtable with educators from around the country to discuss ways of teaching and engaging the National Monument Audit. The panelists will discuss the ways classrooms – especially K-12 classrooms, college courses, and arts and cultural spaces – can participate in extending the learnings from the audit.
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Co-Directors
Laurie Allen
Paul Farber
Sue Mobley

Project Data Artist
Brian Foo

Contributing Editor
Patricia Eunji Kim

Design
William Hodgson
Froyo Tam
Jakob Rosenzweig

Project Managers
Matthew Seamus Callinan
Greta Gabriel

Research Associates
Alissa Ujie Diamond
Chrislyn Laurie Laurore
Allison Nkwocha
Malkia Okech
Christopher Roberts
Pamela Nicole Walker
Phoebe Young

Interns
Veronica Brown
Rudy Gerson
Anna Green
Nicole Piepenbrink
Lena Popkin
Hana Pyzik
Saguna Raina

Communications
Florie Hutchinson
Dina Paola Rodriguez
Jose Vazquez

Educational Advisor
Rabiya Kassam-Clay

Copy Editor
Gretchen Dykstra

Advisory Board
Andrea Roberts (Texas A&M University)
Katrina Phillips (Macalester College)
Kirk Savage (University of Pittsburgh)
Krystal Strong (University of Pennsylvania)
Geoff Ward (Washington University of St. Louis)

Monument Lab Staff
Kristen Giannantonio
Naima Murphy Salcido
Nico Rodriguez
Sarah Spencer

Legal Partners
Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic

Special thanks to
Elizabeth Alexander, Julie Ehrlich, Justin Garrett Moore, Vanessa Correa, Tatiana Evans, Josie Hodson, the Monument Lab Advisory Board, Shannon Mattern, John Carr, Julia Guerrero, Materials Conservation, attendees of the audit focus groups, and the Center for Public Art and Space and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.

Supported by
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation