Niagara Gazette  November 10, 2012  Historian: Monuments to
early U.S. vets were overdue  The Associated Press Niagara
Gazette     It wasn't until after the vast bloodletting of the
Civil War that the nation took retroactive steps to pay tribute
to those earlier veterans, Chambers said. Up until then, America
was "too busy building economies and cities and growing and
expanding to necessarily worry about the past," he said.  The
practice of erecting war monuments while battles are still fresh
in everyone's memory dates to ancient times. The Romans excelled
at it, perhaps most famously with Trajan's Column, a 125-foot-
tall marble structure featuring a continuous relief depicting
their legions defeating the Dacians in the early second century
A.D. Napoleon Bonaparte, never shy about touting his own martial
successes, ordered the construction of Arc de Triomphe after his
victory at Austerlitz in 1806. Today it's one of France's most
famous monuments.  "It's not new," Chambers said, "it's just
that Americans take