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. …
Tag Archives: monuments
Postscript to My Favorite Statue in Prague — Podcast Is Linked Below!
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 …
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“Go West”- Cue the Pet Shop Boys
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 …
The Politics of Memory: The Czechification of an International Spa Town after 1945
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 …
Historic Monuments as Sites of Nationalist Tension
“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 …
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Of Monuments and Memory 