This chapter examines how the past is materialized in public space and civic time—through monuments, place names, museums, calendars, and rituals—and how these fixtures mediate political conflict and claims to legitimacy. The prologue illustrates how charged symbols can be mobilized into collective action, underscoring that objects and images do not merely reflect politics; they can activate it. The core analysis traces the life cycle of monuments and commemorative forms: erected for didactic and legitimating purposes, normalized and semantically thinned over time, periodically reactivated by ritual or controversy, and—at moments of crisis—removed, recontextualized, or replaced. Across U.S. and post-Soviet cases, the chapter shows how authorities curate a hegemonic symbolic order—a “gridwork” of space and time—via renamings, holiday reforms, and commemorative practices, and how revolutionary change resets that order to authorize new values. The epilogue considers artistic ensembles as palimpsests whose meanings are re-read rather than fixed. Overall, control of the symbolic infrastructure of memory stabilizes narratives, yet its very visibility makes it a recurrent site of contestation.