Abstract
In his new book, Roger C. Aden recounts the saga of Philadelphia’s President’s House monument and its problematic commemoration from 2002 through 2011. Upon the Ruins of Liberty recalls the chronicle of George Washington, in a presidential mansion located within spitting distance of the Liberty Bell, bending laws to accommodate his own personal dependence on slavery. It is such an egregious episode that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the National Park Service (NPS) buried its memory—along with the building’s foundations— beneath, of all things, a public restroom. The site remained unrecognized until a coalition of historians, preservationists, and activists demanded that the site be commemorated, or perhaps even reconstructed. What they they got was a bit of both, a mélange of confusing interpretive contrivances wedged into one of Philadelphia’s busiest street corners, leaving visitors with an unclear impression of what any of it means.