Women Who Travel Podcast: Ashley C. Ford Explores America's Landmarks

22.11.2024 - 00:15 / cntraveler.com

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This episode, we join Ashley C. Ford, a writer, educator, and host of the podcast Monumental, and move around the United States to find out more about statues, monuments, memorials, and landmarks. Who gets to put them up? And how are our ideas about them changing? Plus, Ashley shares her own personal stories about the monuments that changed her ways of thinking.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and on this episode of Women Who Travel, we're moving around the country to find out more about statues, monuments, memorials, and landmarks. Who gets to choose to put them up, and how are our ideas about them changing?

Ashley C. Ford: Monuments are about learning and remembering what happened here, or at least at their best, that's what they're meant to do.

LA: My guest is writer and podcast host, Ashley C. Ford, whose work I've been following for quite some time.

We are talking about travel today, but through quite a specific lens. You are the host of PRX's Monumental. What does the podcast and the theme mean personally to you?

ACF: I think that talking about monuments, memorials, the landmarks that we pay attention to, helps us tell our own story in this country,.I have always found monuments and memorials to be so fun and curiosity inducing. As a kid, I would run to every plaque, I would run to any monument, especially if I could touch it.

LA: Which often you're not allowed to do.

ACF: Which often you're not allowed to do, but it helps, especially when it comes to kids who have a more tactile discovery button like me.

LA: That's so funny though, because I feel like the sort of cliche of being a kid when you're traveling or anywhere with your parents is having to stand while they read the plaque, and yet you were the one that was running towards it.

ACF: Yes.

LA: What was that curiosity? Because clearly you've carried it through.

ACF: Yes, well, I think initially it started with the fact that I grew up in a home where we didn't take a whole lot of vacations. We didn't go see a whole lot of things, and there was no guarantee for me that if I got the special opportunity to see something or be around something that I would ever get to be around it again. So I felt this real responsibility to memorize figures in history or these art pieces that were meant to represent an event that I had never heard of but now I was going to be a little fascinated and a little weird about because I had been in the presence of something that made me curious. I think everybody can come to a love of something like landmarks differently, but it really does start with a child being encouraged. Not that