This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' ...wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.
At the end of the First World War, countries across Europe participated in an unprecedented ritual in which a single, anonymous body was buried to symbolize the overwhelming trauma of the ...battlefields; The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier explores the creation and reception of this symbolic national burial as an emblem for modern mourning.
Is it “Stalinist” for a formerly communist country to tear down a statue of Stalin? Should the Confederate flag be allowed to fly over the South Carolina state capitol? Is it possible for ...America to honor General Custer and the Sioux Nation, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln? Indeed, can a liberal, multicultural society memorialize anyone at all, or is it committed to a strict neutrality about the quality of the lives led by its citizens? In Written in Stone , legal scholar Sanford Levinson considers the tangled responses of ever-changing societies to the monuments and commemorations created by past regimes or outmoded cultural and political systems. Drawing on examples from Albania to Zimbabwe, from Moscow to Managua, and paying particular attention to examples throughout the American South, Levinson looks at social and legal arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and destruction of public monuments. He asks what kinds of claims the past has on the present, particularly if the present is defined in dramatic opposition to its past values. In addition, he addresses the possibilities for responding to the use and abuse of public spaces and explores how a culture might memorialize its historical figures and events in ways that are beneficial to all its members. Written in Stone is a meditation on how national cultures have been or may yet be defined through the deployment of public monuments. It adds a thoughtful and crucial voice into debates surrounding historical accuracy and representation, and will be welcomed by the many readers concerned with such issues.
The purpose of this article is to review the case law of administrative courts from recent years concerned with the removal of a monument from the monuments register. This procedure should be ...applied with extreme caution, in accordance with the legal rules and interpretation of the administrative courts, in particular with regard to the premise of destroying a monument connected with losing its values as a monument. The study draws attention to the problem of the failure of the owner or holder of a building to fulfil his duty of care towards a monument. It can be drawn from the examined judgments, that such omissions cannot serve as a reason for the removal of a monument from the register.Keywords:monument, monuments register, removal of the monument from the monuments register, monument’s values, monument’s destroying
Le monument n’est pas un objet simple tant il estcomme protégé par son évidence. Il tient son caractèretrès particulier du fait d’être toujours situé au carrefour :entre plusieurs formes, entre ...plusieurs intentions, entreplusieurs réceptions (Fabre 2016 : 196). Ce numéro thématique est consacré à l’étude de la monumentalité contemporaine en Afrique subsaharienne. Il invite à réfléchir de façon concomitante aux intentions commémoratives des gouvernements commanditaires de monuments et aux pratiques mémorielles que ces monuments induisent auprès d’acteurs divers. Rassemblant pour la première fois des études de cas consacrées à des monuments publics édifiés depuis le début des années 2000, ce dossier s’adosse à une démarche propre aux sciences sociales qui inscrit ces monuments dans leur espace social, politique et physique et resitue leurs usages dans une histoire longue : on peut dire, en ce sens, que les analyses menées donnent chair à la pierre. La notion de monument public couvre ici un large spectre de commandes officielles installées dans des espaces publics, allant des statues aux sculptures en passant par des stèles, des édifices religieux, des tours ou encore des mémoriaux. À chaque fois, ces édifices de plein air s’inscrivent dans des projets de réaménagements des hypercentres urbains qui, parce qu’ils sont imposés « par le haut » (l’État, l’Église), cherchent à instaurer une conception hégémonique de la communauté, son identité, son rapport au monde, à l’histoire, ou encore au divin. Mais ces nouveaux monuments, outils de légitimation du pouvoir, ravivent souvent en creux le souvenir d’anciens bâtiments, statues et objets déboulonnés, détruits ou laissés à l’abandon. Leur immobilité et leur supposée permanence — ce que l’anthropologue Michael Herzfeld (2001 : 47) nomme « la fixité temporelle, symbolique et idéologique impliquée par l’idée même de monument — tranchent avec les dynamiques qu’ils provoquent par leur intégration à la vie quotidienne des individus, les possibles réactions d’hostilité qu’ils suscitent ou encore les diverses mises en récit qui les accompagnent.
One of the most important monuments of Imperial Rome and at the same time one of the most poorly understood, the Column of Marcus Aurelius has long stood in the shadow of the Column of Trajan. InThe ...Column of Marcus Aurelius, Martin Beckmann makes a thorough study of the form, content, and meaning of this infrequently studied monument. Beckmann employs a new approach to the column, one that focuses on the process of its creation and construction, to uncover the cultural significance of the column to the Romans of the late second century A.D. Using clues from ancient sources and from the monument itself, this book traces the creative process step by step from the first decision to build the monument through the processes of planning and construction to the final carving of the column's relief decoration. The conclusions challenge many of the widely held assumptions about the value of the column's 700-foot-long frieze as a historical source. By reconstructing the creative process of the column's sculpture, Beckmann opens up numerous new paths of analysis not only to the Column of Marcus Aurelius but also to Roman imperial art and architecture in general.
Thought-provoking reflection on culture, colonialism, and the remainders of empire in Belgium after 1960The degree to which the late colonial era affected Europe has been long underappreciated, and ...only recently have European countries started to acknowledge not having come to terms with decolonisation. In Belgium, the past two decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the controversial episodes in the country's colonial past. This volume examines the long-term effects and legacies of the colonial era on Belgium after 1960, the year the Congo gained its independence, and calls into question memories of the colonial past by focusing on the meaning and place of colonial monuments in public space. The book foregrounds the enduring presence of "empire" in everyday Belgian life in the form of permanent colonial markers in bronze and stone,lieux de mémoireof the country's history of overseas expansion. By means of photographs and explanations of major pro-colonial memorials, as well as several obscure ones, the book reveals the surprising degree to which Belgium became infused with a colonialist spirit during the colonial era. Another key component of the analysis is an account of the varied ways in which both Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians approached the colonial past after 1960, treating memorials variously as objects of veneration, with indifference, or as symbols to be attacked or torn down. The book provides a thought-provoking reflection on culture, colonialism, and the remainders of empire in Belgium after 1960. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer Review Content).
