It’s worth pointing out that Loewen’s Lies Across America lists monuments large and small that shouldn’t be rebuilt in anything like their present form, if at all. The endless parade of Confederate/SOC/UDC monuments, many redundant and in absurd locations, would be high (low) on the list.
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Read up on the history of the place- stones have been moved, set in concrete, re-erected in a way some random guy thought they looked better… It’s already been almost entirely reconstructed over the years…
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Oh I know that. But it’s not like anyone tried to re-build the whole thing.
Anyway, Avebury is way better. But foreigners won’t have heard of it.
I can’t envision any monument being rebuilt. Like the WTC, there would be a committee made up of TPTB’s cronies, who would then recommend a new monument/landmark. Submissions would be requested, then the contract let to one of TPTB’s cronies.
It’s a moot point now but I guess there wouldn’t have been any rush to rebuild The Spindle.
I think the appeal of Stonehenge over the hundreds of other megalithic sites is that it’s completely exposed on the plain and makes one compact group for the eye, and is composed of some of the most immense components used anywhere.
Avebury Circle is composed of much smaller stones and is so big it’s hard to appreciate without effort (for those who don’t know, it contains an entire village in its center, without crowding). Even the site that’s long rows of hundreds (thousands?) of menhirs is not as visually impressive or easy to grasp in a single view.
But the megaliths are fascinating, all of them, and I hope to see most of the major ones before I go off on my own astronomical alignment.
The memorial to this massacre raises a question since while it commemorates a real massacre, it was built by the Nazis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden
Yeah, because preserving beautiful parks is as important as founding the country, writing the Declaration of Independence, and freeing the slaves.
Three of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore were great leaders and profound thinkers.
Teddy was an okay guy, but not in the same league.
He’s the kind of politician whose portrait should be available in the gift shop, not engraved in stone.
Calgary.
Yeah. Even if an earthquake just knocked them over but the stones were intact, the point of Stonehenge is “holy shit, a bunch of primitives put that together with nothing but rope and muscles”. Since I expect we’d probably just have a guy in a machine put it back together, it’d no longer be particularly impressive. Same goes for all the ancient monuments, IMO.
I think you’re grossly underestimating TR’s legacy. Easy to do; 1890-1920 is a dead zone in American politics and history.
He got teddy bears named after him. Does he really need a big stone face too?
Avebury is awesome – they just had a bit about it on the BBC
Personally, I like that it’s quieter and more out of the way; you can still mess about with/on the monoliths, and it’s not a traffic-tailback-magnet or overrun by busloads of tourists the way Stonehenge is (nor do you have to pay a fortune and shuffle through a giftshop to get to it first). It’s another site that was restored as many of the stones were fallen over (including one that had fallen on someone several hundred years ago - they found his remains squashed underneath when they lifted the stone back into place.)
Also Silbury Hill and the longbarrows are nearby!