The North Carolina memorial stands in Gettysburg National Military Park on Aug. 10, 2020.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
How should opposing armies be commemorated on a battlefield? Gettysburg offers an especially interesting example of today’s debates over Confederate monuments.
Victims’ names engraved in a metal overhang, part of the Triangle Shirtwaist Memorial, are reflected in mirroring panels along the sidewalk.
AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
A memorial at the site of the 1911 fire remembers those who died; a cadre of young Jewish women helped push for change in the wake of the tragedy.
Activists in Newark, N.J., offer tours that teach visitors about the city’s legacy of industrial pollution and environmental racism.
Charles Rotkin/Corbis via Getty Images
Societies celebrate heroes and commemorate tragedies. But why is there so little public acknowledgment of environmental disasters?
A 6 meter tall Ned Kelly stands on the main street of Glenrowan, Victoria.
Shutterstock
The Victorian Supreme Court has determined the descendants of Ned Kelly’s family are not a distinctive cultural group with the right to protections of their ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
People at a vigil at St Peter’s church in Nottingham after three people died in an attack in the city’s centre.
PA Images/Alamy
When an attack affects a whole city the grief members of the community feel is complex.
The Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. memorial sculpture at Boston Common is called ‘The Embrace.’
Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
A memorial to Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. has received stinging criticisms, but time will tell whether ‘The Embrace’ will endure as a cherished work of public art.
A candlelit vigil for murdered 16-year-old Brianna Ghey in Manchester.
Adam Vaughan/EPA
Vigils for LGBTQ+ people turn public spaces into a collective space of belonging with one another
Wikimedia Commons
Across Australia, there are memorials to white people ‘killed by Natives’. But there is a silence about what led to these attacks, or the reprisal massacres that typically followed.
An artist’s impression of Gan Siyobonga memorial park in Israel.
Supplied by author
Gan Siyabonga is unique in Israel. It highlights a group that was both anti-apartheid and pro-Zionist.
Plaques commemorating artists who were killed by the Nazis are marked with flowers in Austria in 2020.
Barbara Gindl/APA/AFP via Getty Images
Spain has long avoided addressing the fact that tens of thousands of Spaniards were victims of Nazis, who collaborated with Spain’s former dictator, Francisco Franco.
The Obelisk, adorned with communist star, was torn down in Riga, Latvia.
Ints Vikmanis/Alamy
History is not being destroyed but the way people remember is being changed.
Spontaneous memorials started appearing in the vicinity of the tower in the days and weeks after the fire.
Mark Kerrison / Alamy Stock Photo
Designing a memorial that helps the community grieve and heal is no easy task.
‘Antigone leads Oedipus out of Thebes’ painting by Charles Francois Jalabert.
Collection Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille via Wikimedia Commons
A scholar of Greek classics revisits the texts to bring lessons on how to honor the lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.
An art installation by Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19, near the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
The Civil War – the second-most-deadly event in US history, just behind COVID-19 –contributed to lasting changes in how Americans care for the dead.
Adam Jones/flickr
Many countries revere soldiers who have given their lives for their country. What is special about Ukraine’s memorialising is the depth of respect for individual citizens.
Andy Rain/EPA
A new politics of remembrance emerged during the COVID pandemic.
A group of schoolgirls in Czyzew, Poland, before the Holocaust.
Czyżew Yizkor Book by Shimon Kanc/New York Public Library
Yom HaShoah is a day to commemorate the murder of 6 million Jews – but also their lives. Yizker bikher books lovingly document Jewish communities across Europe.
Crosses in honor of fallen Marines stand atop a hill near Camp Pendleton, California.
Katrina Finkelstein
For some military members, a hillside in California embodies the sacrifices of serving.
Part of the joy of emerging from the pandemic has been to once again be able to hug friends and family.
Jose Jordan/AFP via Getty Images
Many people are starting to celebrate the return to a pre-pandemic life. How does that feel to those who have suffered losses and are still grieving?
Britain’s first professional writer: Aphra Behn.
Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Statues can help us more fully understand our past and celebrate the contribution of women.