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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross.

You don't have to look far in the United States or any country to find landmarks commemorating

our history, statues, museums, monuments and plaques honoring proud moments from our past

and those responsible for them.

But what do we do or say about our past sins as a nation?

Our gassed Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith wrote a book about his visit to eight sites

in the U.S. that in some way deal with the legacy of slavery, from a graveyard honoring

Confederate soldiers to a historic plantation that focuses on the experience of enslaved

people. For an article in the Atlantic's December issue, Smith traveled to Germany to explore

how the Holocaust is memorialized in that country. He found innovative memorials acknowledging

the deportation and mass murder of Europe's Jews. But he also discovered there were intense

debates about what kind of landmarks should be established and how the story would be told,

debates that are ongoing. Clint Smith is a writer and poet. His book about American

remembrances of slavery, how the word is passed, was a number one New York Times best

seldom and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. It will be published

in paperback at the end of December. In 2016, he had a book of poetry published titled

Counting Descent and will have a new book of poems in March. Clint Smith's article in

the Atlantic about German commemorations of the Holocaust is titled Monuments to the

Unthinkable. Clint Smith, welcome back to Fresh Air.

It's so good to be here with you.

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