Considers monuments in Ottawa, Canada's capital city, as actors participating in dynamic city life rather than objects of history or artifacts of art. Readers are introduced to a wide scope of Canadian history and current issues as well as the fraught subject about whether some monuments should be removed.

Through a series of tours of the monuments of Ottawa, this book argues that rather than instructing people on what to know about history, monuments generate feelings about the past in the present. As ambivalent sites, monuments allow for the generation of competing feelings: nostalgia, dissent, indifference.