In 1912, the First International Eugenics Conference was hosted in London. The conference was dedicated to Francis Galton, whose legacy with eugenics continues to be associated with University College London. The legacy of Galton and other eugenic scientists remains for many a symbol of racism, imperialism and inequality. This study… Read More
The Republic of Croatia Square in Zagreb has been renamed numerous times since the 20th century. Although its geographical place name sometimes referred to it, it was most well-known as the Square of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Croatia’s independence in… Read More
The Green Bridge is located in the city centre of Vilnius, Lithuania, and since its rebuilding following the Second World War, it was decorated with four groups of statues created by multiple Lithuanian artists in the Socialist realism style. Discussions about the statues split Lithuanian society when some groups advocated… Read More
In 2015, Yale President Peter Salovey raised the issue of the namesake of Calhoun College during his address to incoming freshmen. The building had been named after a supporter of slavery, prompting university-wide debate about the value of changing the name of the residential building. While initially against a name… Read More
Omarska Concentration Camp in Prijedor is notorious for being the site of the 1992 PrijedorMassacre during the Bosnian War; it featured prominently in several trials for the perpetrationof international crimes undertaken by the International Criminal Tribunal of the FormerYugoslavia. Since 2004, numerous attempts at commemoration for the victims of the… Read More
During World War II, the U.S. Government incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans in so-called War Relocation Centres around the country. One of them was the Manzanar Relocation Center, which at its peak, housed around 11,000 detainees. Incarcerated behind barbed wire and guard towers, Japanese American families lost their freedom which… Read More
The term ‘squaw’ (hereafter sq___) is widely considered an offensive, derogatory, racist and misogynistic word to refer to Native American women. In 2021, following the renaming of the Sq___ Valley ski resort in the unincorporated populated place in Olympic Valley in Placer County, California, to ‘Palisades Tahoe Ski Resort’, a… Read More
United States By Ngoc Tram Nguyen December 2022… Read More
Northern Ireland By Paula O’Donohoe October 2022… Read More
In Vienna, over 160 streets bear the names of controversial historical figures. One of these streets, once called Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring, was named after a prominent anti-Semitic agitator whose ideology inspired the dogmatic policies of Adolf Hitler. In 2011, an archival report investigated the acts of controversial historical figures with names in… Read More
In the past decade, Harvard University has taken great strides to acknowledge the legacy of slavery on campus. Slavery provided an impetus for the creation of resources at Harvard, and several enslaved Black and Indigenous individuals of former university presidents even resided on campus at specific points. Centuries later, Harvard… Read More
Commonly known as Fawara Chowk (Fountain Roundabout), the formal name, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Chowk roundabout, has been the source of contestation since 2016. The roundabout is directly adjacent to the former prison where Sikh Marxist-Revolutionary Bhagat Singh was executed in 1931 by the British. Since then, the prison has been… Read More