Monuments Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Confederate Monuments Are Not History

Like the contemporary war on “critical race theory,” these statues of the defeated prop up white supremacy in the name of a false past

June 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Karen L. Cox

_____ It seemed as though monuments were suddenly in the news during Donald Trump’s presidency, but they have always been controversial. Monuments to the Confederacy were contested by African American citizens as soon as they appeared after 1865. Black citizens understood these monuments for what they were: a rallying point for ...

New York City

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

The limits of monuments in public remembrance

April 27, 2021 • by Silvana Alvarez Basto

The tensions between public monuments and history frequently orbit the question of “historical faithfulness” or “accuracy.” The controversy surrounding the new women’s rights monument in Central Park is an example of these tensions. Sculpted by Meredith Bergmann, the monument represents suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth. ...

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

Education

UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

This doesn’t solve the problem: and the money could go to pay grad students a living wage

December 14, 2018 • by Meli Kimathi

On the night of December 8, after proctoring the final exam for the undergraduate course I teach, I got the phone call that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. “What are your thoughts on participation?” my co-instructor asked. “I have so many overlapping concerns that I don’t know where to begin!” I exclaimed. ...

UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

Feature

Omnipotent Leviathan – or Lost in Transition?

Russia’s approach to the past as portrayed in the recent Memorial to the Victims of the Soviet Repressions

November 7, 2018 • by Selbi Durdiyeva

A meme surfaced recently in Russia that says, “Today you should believe in the Russian Empire, the USSR, Stalin, Putin, and God, simultaneously.” The politics of identity at play in Russia are indeed illogical. We see former KGB officers and loyal Communist Party members now wholeheartedly praying in an Orthodox ...

Omnipotent Leviathan – or Lost in Transition?

Feature

A Letter from the Valley of the Fallen

Spain wrestles with its Franquista past

September 25, 2018 • by Anna Oakes

In June, the center-left administration of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s newly appointed prime minister, announced the government’s intention to exhume Francisco Franco’s body and move it to an as-yet-undecided location. Since the announcement, a renewed national debate has broken out in Spain over Franco’s legacy. The Franco family have made clear their intentions ...

Feature

No Offense to Robert Musil, But…

The continuing relevance of monuments

April 6, 2018 • by Samantha Oliver

In a 1927 essay, acclaimed Austrian philosopher Robert Musil famously declared, “The remarkable thing about monuments is that one does not notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” Musil believed that monuments recede into the background as the public becomes more familiar with them ...