The Stone Mountain Park Memorial is the largest Confederate memorial in the U.S., and the controversy around it demonstrates that the American Civil War’s emancipatory purpose remains contested more than a century-and-a-half after its end. Despite multiple protests, and a gubernatorial campaign running on a platform against the monument’s… Read More
Stolpersteine or ‘stumbling stones’ are components of a project initiated by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1996 to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. The memorials, in the form of cobblestones installed in public streets, now number in the tens of thousands across Europe and beyond. However, they have also… Read More
The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington, D.C., United States, is a monument to the 112,581 Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. Government during World War II. It also commemorates Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Military. The inscriptions in the memorial received… Read More
Jan van Riebeeck arrived at Cape of Good Hope in 1652. His mission was to create a station for the Dutch East India Company’s ships. This meant colonising the lands inhabited by the Khoikhoi. To keep them from accessing his land, van Riebeeck planted a wild almond hedge. The… Read More
José Miguel Gómez was a celebrated military general who led Cuban forces during the wars of independence against Spain in the 19th century and served as Cuba’s second president between 1909 and 1913. The monument was first inaugurated in 1936. The statue has consistently been a source of contention. Read More
In 1902 as requested in his last will and testament, British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes was buried atop a granite hill in Zimbabwe’s world-famous Matobo National Park. Almost 120 years later, the site of his grave has become increasingly contested in light of his intimate involvement with colonisation and… Read More
Nicknamed the ‘Slaughterer of Banda,’ the figure of Jan Pieterszoon Coen has become increasingly contested in recent years. The statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn has been a disputed monument since its unveiling in 1893. The statue has been smeared with red paint and graffiti numerous times in… Read More
The late nineteenth century saw the systematic killing of the Selk’nam indigenous group members at the hands of European settlers in Punta Arenas, Chile. Until 2007, the official state narrative surrounding the fate of the Selk’nam failed to recognise the genocidal dynamics underpinning the dramatic decline in their population. Read More
In 2015, a citizen advisory committee including several Indigenous activists proposed that ‘Lake Calhoun’—christened for John C. Calhoun, antebellum politician, slavery advocate, and proponent of the Indian Removal Act—be restored to its original Dakota place name, ‘Bde Maka Ska’, meaning ‘White Earth Lake’. What followed was a contentious legal… Read More
On 21 June 2021 plans were confirmed for the removal of the statue of Theodore Roosevelt, which had been standing outside the American Museum of Natural History since 1939. The eventual decision to remove the statue came after years of debate, protests and multiple instances of vandalism. The decision… Read More
The statue of Sebastian de Belalcazar, erected in 1940 in Popayan, Colombia, was torn down in September 2020 during a wave of protests. Local indigenous communities had long considered the statue as the embodiment of the city’s colonial past, and a symbol of the continued impact on their lived… Read More
In Central Park in New York, New York, a statue of physician J. Marion Sims was raised in 1934. Sims was credited with highly impactful procedures in gynaecology; However, many of these procedures were generated by conducting surgery on enslaved Black women without anaesthesia. Local activists began calling for… Read More