Monuments and Collective Memory
I’ve long appreciated the First World War memorials to which the Czechs have added the names of Second World War dead, victims of fascism and communism, and in one case, the dead from UN service. Makes good use of existing monuments. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument in front of the old Kane County Courthouse in …
Continue reading “Kane County, Illinois’ Multipurpose War Memorial”
When I went to Charleston for the first time late last year, I had no real visual idea of the city. I did expect to find Civil War memorials of some kind, even if they were only the ghosts of standing confederate soldiers or a Confederate general atop his stallion that had recently been removed. …
Last autumn, Chad Bryant, my friend and colleague who teaches at UNC, asked me if I’d zoom with some of his students about a monument, a street sign, or some other part of the built environment that tells us something about a moment in time in Prague’s history. And so I did. No surprise that …
Continue reading “Postscript to My Favorite Statue in Prague — Podcast Is Linked Below!”
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’ve long been fascinated by the baroque Plague Columns (Pestsaule/Morový sloup/Kolumna dżumy) that dot Habsburg Central Europe, many of which are at the same time either Marian Columns or Holy Trinity Columns. They often incorporate various plague saints, among them Saints Roch, Rosalie, and Sebastian. These columns are my absolute favorite form of baroque art. …
Continue reading “What will Our Twenty-First Century Plague Columns Look like?”
I’ve never much liked Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory), dating back to when I spent time reading my parents’ copy of an illustrated lives of presidents. You know, I was at that age when you memorize all the presidents’ names in order of when they served. I’m not even sure what it was I didn’t like. …
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”
Unveiled in 1909, the statue of a Confederate private in Nashville’s Centennial Park is not some unknown soldier, but rather according to the Smithsonian, it represents Tennessee’s own Confederate boy hero, Sam Davis. 1909 must have been a busy year for Confederate boy-hero statues in Nashville, because two were unveiled that year, the second on …
Continue reading “Nashville’s Very Own Confederate Private Statue”
There was plenty of snow on the ground one Saturday in early December 2010 when my friends, Oksana and Viktor, and I decided we needed to go to Kosiv, a town in the Carpathians some fifty miles away from Chernivtsi. This small town on the Rybnytsya River in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is well known as …
Continue reading “Remembering the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in Western Ukraine”
I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had …
Of Monuments and Memory