[L]iberal cities have not found it self-evident that their massacres should be enshrined in memorials and museums. There is no imposing memorial or museum in London dedicated to the Blitz, in which more than forty thousand civilians were killed, or any parallel memorial to the aerial bombings in Hamburg. Nor is what gets remembered the same as what gets a memorial. We have Holocaust museums in Washington and New York, even though the massacre of Jews took place largely in Poland and the Ukraine. Yet we have no National Slavery Memorial – and are only now getting a National Museum of African American History and Culture – despite the fact that this horror has never ceased to shadow American life.
Adam Gopnik, “Stones and Bones”, The New Yorker (7 & 14 July 2014), 41.