A is not a record of the past but a statement made at the moment of its .
Its date tells you more about the politics of that year than about the person it .
A great many statues of seventeenth-century figures were put up in the late nineteenth century.
They were not those figures so much as recruiting them for a contemporary argument.
This is generally accepted by historians and is almost never mentioned in the disputes about removal.
Those disputes proceed as though the choice lay between preserving history and it.
Neither description fits, because a statue is not a historical source in the sense a document is.
Removing it destroys no information; the person remains in every archive and every textbook.
Keeping it preserves no information either, since a statue on a states only that somebody was honoured.
What is actually at stake is a present-day question about whom a public space honours.
Framing that question as a question about history is a way of avoiding having to answer it.
Some cities have found a third option that satisfies fewer people and teaches more.
They leave the statue in place and add, at eye level, an account of when it was erected and why.
The addition converts an into a document, which is what its defenders claimed it was.
Neither side tends to like this outcome, which is some evidence that it is the right one.
Removal remains appropriate where the figure was honoured specifically for what is now objected to.
A distinction between honouring a person despite something and honouring them for it is not a .
It is the only principle in this argument that produces different answers in different cases.