Free
Washington, D.C., is full of monuments and memorials. They honor people and events in U.S. history.
Monuments and More
The Washington Monument is 555 feet and 5-1/8 inches tall. It’s the tallest stone, brick, or concrete structure on Earth. It’s also Washington’s only skyscraper. Work started in 1848 with private money. The money ran out in 1860. Author Mark Twain said the unfinished monument looked like “a factory chimney with the top broken off.” It was finally finished in 1884. People thought the steam elevator was risky, so women and children had to walk up the 896 steps. Today everyone has to take the elevator up. You can take a 45-minute tour walking down.
▲ Thomas Jefferson was the nation’s third president. He also wrote the Declaration of Independence. This memorial to him was completed in 1943, the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. When plans showed the memorial would be built on the Tidal Basin, people chained themselves to the Japanese cherry trees. They feared construction would kill the trees. In the end, only a few trees were lost.
▲ Arlington National Cemetery is across the Potomac River from D.C. More than 400,000 veterans and their family members are buried there. The Tomb of the Unknowns contains the bodies of four unidentified soldiers. There’s one each from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. A soldier stands guard around the clock.
◀ The Korean War Veterans Memorial has statues of 19 soldiers crossing a field. A black granite wall shows their support groups, such as nurses.
◀ The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a V-shaped wall of shiny black granite. You can read on it the names of the nearly 60,000 U.S. service members who died or were declared missing in action in Southeast Asia between 1959 and 1975. Some visitors leave flowers, war medals, notes, and pictures near certain names. There was a national contest to design the memorial. When Maya Ying Lin won, she was a 21-year-old art student. Her art professor only gave her a B– for the design. Today, it’s one of the city’s most successful monuments. It gets more visitors than any other memorial does.
▲ During World War II, a group of marines fought to raise the U.S. flag on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. A photographer caught them in the act. Later, this scene was turned into the biggest bronze sculpture ever made. It stands in Arlington National Cemetery. It serves as the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial.
Think Piece!
What if you could design a monument to honor some person or event in U.S. history? Who or what would you choose? What would the monument look like? Where in Washington, D.C., would you put it?
Loading the player...
