You're listening to the History Extra Podcast brought to you by the team behind BBC History magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Matt Elton. Today we have a recording of the first of our virtual lockdown lectures.

This talk was delivered on the 9th of July 2020, so a little has happened in the interim,

but it's still a topical and timely subject. Our speaker is Keith Lowe, and the title of the

talk is, Should I stay or should I go, the problem with historical monuments in 2020.

Keith has written a new book called Prisoners of History

what monuments tell us about our history and ourselves, published by William Collins, on which this talk is based.

Well, this has been one hell of a year, hasn't it? I mean, I don't know about you, but when I raised my champagne glass at midnight on New Year's Eve I thought that I was

hosting in the arrival of 2020 but after just a couple of months it suddenly felt like we'd

been transported back to the flu pandemic of

1918 a couple of months after that there was the 75th anniversary of the E day and we were suddenly in 1945. Then George Floyd died in

Minneapolis and all of a sudden we were in 1968. In America there were protests all over the country people began to tear down one

statue after another statues of Confederate generals statues of slave owners, even statues of Christopher Columbus.

Before we knew it, the Black Lives Matter movement had spread to Britain, to Europe, to Australia, to New Zealand. We all started having our own protests, our own demonstrations

and our own tearing down of statues and it was still only June.

1918, 1945, 1968.

All these layers of history seem to be piling up one on top of another and until 2020 was beginning to look like a sort of some kind of historical puff pastry.

But I don't think we should be too surprised about this because in reality, it's probably not so different from the way that we've always lived. We can't escape the echoes of the past. We're all prisoners of our history. Which leads me nicely on to my book of course which just so happens to be called

prisoners of history. In the book I take just one of these layers that we've been experiencing recently this

1945 layer and I focus on the same thing that the Black Lives Matter movement has

also been focusing on recently.

Monuments aren't just lumps of bronze and stone. They are powerful symbols. That's the reason why we put them up isn't it?

Because they symbolize something important to us. Our Second World War monuments are some of the most dramatic and emotive monuments that we have.

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