Monuments and Collective Memory
Following the First World War, the leaders of Czechoslovakia created new holidays, among them, one celebrating the Battle of Zborov (“Army Day”) on July 2. Together with October 28, the day the Czechoslovak Republic was declared in Prague, Zborov was the main commemorative site on Czechoslovakia’s national-patriotic calendar. Because it was only one of many …
Continue reading “The Battle of Zborov, the Czechs, and Their Two-Tailed Lion”
Like the three-quarter-size Statues-of-Liberty that the Boy Scouts unveiled in the 1950s, and many of the Joseph II statues unveiled across the Bohemian Lands and Lower Austria in the 1880s, sculptor Ernest Moore Viquesney’s First World War statues, “The Spirit of the American Doughboy,” that dot the American landscape are production-line products. The sculptor carefully …
I’d never heard of Alvin Cullum York until I visited Nashville, Tennessee. Fascinated as I am by First World War monuments, I headed straight for the larger-than-life-sized bronze figure with bayonet drawn on corner of the capitol lawn. York, a pacifist, was born in a log cabin some 125 miles east of Nashville, in central-ish …
Continue reading “Alvin Cullum York, American Hero of the First World War”
The Tennessee state house is an imposing Greek Revival building, sitting as it does atop a hill in Nashville. Like other state capitols and courthouses across the country, its lawn is dotted with monuments. They include statues of two of Tennessee’s three presidents: a bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson (it is one of three …
The aftermath of the First World War, with its appalling body count and wholesale devastation, was a period of great memorial construction. In this “democracy of death,” there were attempts across the former belligerent states, with the exception of Soviet Russia, to honor all the war dead, irrespective of rank, and including the unknown dead. …
“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