Monuments and Collective Memory
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’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”
Prague has plenty of statues, some of which I like (the Pomník vojákům Rudé armády, the Red Army Soldiers Monument, near the front entrance of the main train station), some of which annoy me (I mean you, Jan Hus in Old Town Square), and some of which I simply ignore (pretty much anything later than …
Of Monuments and Memory