Departments

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statues

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg
    8/28/2020

    Why the Fight Over Statues Will Never End (video)

    Art historian and "art crime" expert Erin Thompson offers insight into the history of iconoclasm and why social change makes arguments about statues and public memorials inevitable.

  • 7/26/2020

    Let Us Now Remove Famous Men

    by Calvin Schermerhorn

    Should the statues remain up, doing the quiet work of reinforcing white supremacy while we get to work dismantling the interlocking components of structural racism? Or are the statues part of a 400-year history of violence against African-descended people that needs urgent attention and rectification?

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/29/2020

    Confederates in the Capitol

    by William Hogeland

    Even as the United States declined to enforce the Constitution in the former Confederate states, demolishing black citizens’ lives and liberty, first Lee and then the ten other Confederate statues arrived in the hall, with others that have since been replaced, and were embraced by the collection. The whole federal government approved.

  • SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
    6/29/2020

    Calhoun-Fall

    by Peter H. Wood

    "When word spread that the Charleston City Council had voted unanimously to remove the domineering figure from his skyscraping column, I thought of a comment Walt Whitman recorded at the end of the Civil War. After Confederate forces had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the poet overheard a Union soldier observe that the true monuments to Calhoun were the wasted farms and gaunt chimneys scattered over the South."

  • SOURCE: Times of Israel
    6/30/2020

    St. Louis’s Statue of Pius XII: A Double-Standard

    by Eunice G. Pollack

    If Yale has renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun and Princeton will cease to name its public policy school after Woodrow Wilson, the Jesuit St. Louis University should consider evidence of Pope Pius XII's actions in the face of the Holocaust and remove his statue from campus. 

  • SOURCE: St. Louis American
    6/27/2020

    Catholics, Alt Right Clash With Protesters over Louis IX Statue

    One group demanded that its anchoring sculpture, a statue of King Louis IX, come down as a token of reconciliation against the generations of hate they feel the statue represents. A collective of other groups, including individuals who said they belonged to The Catholic Church and white supremacists, stood in defense of the statue of the city’s namesake.

  • SOURCE: Cleveland Plain Dealer
    6/26/2020

    The Rap Against Christopher Columbus Statues Overlooks Their Origins

    by Jonathan Zimmerman

    The great achievement of the 20th-century United States was the integration of formerly excluded ethnics -- Italians, Irish, Jews, and others -- into full citizenship and equality. And the great tragedy was our failure to do the same for nonwhites, especially African Americans and Native Americans.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    6/25/2020

    The Case for a Statue of Limitations

    According to historian Christopher Phelps, Confederate monuments “are a representation of the way people in the early 20th century tried to justify that past and reconcile it with national unity.”