Monuments and Collective Memory
More than sixty years ago, late in the afternoon of January 16, 1969, university student Jan Palach appeared on upper Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. Standing on the ramp before the National Museum, he doused himself with kerocene, and lit himself on fire to protest the Soviet occupation of the country and the …
Continue reading “A Small Memorial to Jan Palach on Wenceslas Square”
I’d been thinking about recent cases of statues in the United States being graffitied, removed, drowned, and/or having their heads cut off when I awakened one recent morning to a message from my friend and colleague, Dr. John Paul Newman. Did I know that Prague’s Marian Column had recently been resurrected? No, I didn’t. I …
Continue reading “Prague’s Marian Column Arises from the Dust Heap of History”
An obelisk honoring the “fallen military heroes” of the US Army’s First Infantry Division—the Big Red One, the army’s oldest—during the Second World War was unveiled outside Cheb, a small Western Bohemian town, on October 26, 1946 in connection with Czechoslovakia’s annual October 28 independence day activities. It is one of five that commemorates the …
Continue reading “The End of the First Infantry Division’s Second World War: Cheb”
Czechoslovakia’s political elites attempted to shape national memory after the Second World War by creating a popular narrative linking an “acceptable” past with the reconstructed state. Naming and commemorating helped establish a Czech national-historical version of the events of the interwar era and the war as they revised the character of private and public spaces …
“Oh, home of tears, but let her bear this blazoned to the end of time: No nation rose so white and fair, none fell so pure of crime.” So reads an inscription on a Confederate soldier statue unveiled in 1911 on the lawn of the Cooke County courthouse in Gainesville, Texas. It is among many …
Continue reading “Historic Monuments as Sites of Nationalist Tension”
Of Monuments and Memory