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: statue
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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Old Hickory’s Bad, Very Bad Reputation
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. …
Nashville’s Very Own Confederate Private Statue
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 …
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Alvin Cullum York, American Hero of the First World War
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 …
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My Favorite Statue in Prague
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 