American museum of natural history

Thursday

Sam Kriss

The art of extinction

From our UK edition

In one of Italo Calvino’s fables, a single dinosaur survives the extinction of his kind. After a few centuries in hiding, he comes out to discover that the world has changed. The ‘New Ones’ who have taken over the planet are still terrified of dinosaurs; they tell each other terrifying stories about the time when the reptiles ruled the world, or secretly fantasise about being brutalised by them, but they don’t recognise the survivor for what he really is. They no longer know what a dinosaur looks like. The newcomer is given a name – the Ugly One – and invited into their society. Eventually, they find a heap of dinosaur bones in a melting glacier, and take their new comrade to gawp at it.

Saturday

Roger Kimball

Adieu, Teddy Roosevelt

It is a custom to offer a blindfold to prisoners facing a firing squad. Just so, the authorities covered the statue of Teddy Roosevelt that has stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History before it is carted off to its new home in North Dakota. Everywhere one turns, America’s past is being dismantled. Just last month, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had graced New York’s City Hall for 187 year was removed.  At schools and colleges across the country, images are being covered or removed, buildings renamed, history rewritten. It’s open season on the past. Back in June 2020, I wrote about the decision to remove the statue of Roosevelt from in front of the institution he help to found.

roosevelt

Thursday

Peter Wood

The Great Self Hate

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.   The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.

great self hate

Monday

Roger Kimball

Teddy Roosevelt saw this mob coming

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

theodore roosevelt