In 2011, a monument commemorating a group of Polish academics killed during the Nazi occupation was unveiled at the site of their death in L΄viv, presently a Ukrainian city. This event became the pinnacle of a commemoration that had developed quite autonomously on both sides of the redrawn Polish-(Soviet)Ukrainian border. The commemorative project and memory event underpinning it are especially interesting owing to the partial recuperation of links with the prewar local genealogies of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. This article explores how a special historic occurrence that took place in wartime L΄viv/Lwów became an issue of continual political significance invested with different truth, originality, and identity claims in Poland and Ukraine. The authors focus on various actors who managed to transform memory about the murdered academics into a public commemorative project and elevate the role of translocal links in the successful realization of the commemorative initiative in question. The concluding part summarizes principal lessons pertaining to commemoration of perished population groups in east-central European borderlands that might be drawn on the basis of the discussed case.

In 2013, Argentina's then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked controversy for her decision to replace a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires with one of nineteenth-century mestiza revolutionary Juana Azurduy. This article examines the history and iconography of these monuments, exploring the intersections between public space, art, politics and memory. It argues that these monuments — one representing Argentina's previously maligned Italian immigrant heritage, the other its forgotten indigenous culture — demonstrate how fundamental struggles over national identity have been embedded and contested in the capital's urban landscape, in ways that remain influential. It highlights Argentina's 1910 centennial and 2010 bicentennial as key to these efforts, and examines the power/politics of place in the central plaza where various actors have fought for public commemorative representation.

The fight for Lwów/Lviv in 1918 was the first military conflict in the difficult twentieth-century history of Polish–Ukrainian relations. In the inter-war period, an impressive military memorial, the Eaglets Cemetery, was constructed in Lwów to honor the young defenders of the city. A monument to the Eaglets was also erected in the neighboring Przemyśl. In inter-war Poland, the Ukrainians, who had lost their cause for state independence, created their own cult of national heroes, the Sich Riflemen. Their graves in Lwów and Przemyśl, as well as in many smaller towns, became sites of public commemoration and national mobilization. This article traces the emergence, the development and the post-World War II decay of both competing memorial cults, focusing on their revival and political uses after 1989. It examines the trans-border aspects of memory politics in Lviv and Przemyśl and analyses the role of war memorials in (re-)establishing the link between ethnic communities and their homelands.

Facing the controversial memory of the Risorgimento, Fascism was compelled to measure itself against Garibaldi, the nation's most celebrated and popular hero. The result was an exaltation of the alleged continuity between Redshirts and Blackshirts, marked by an emphasis on patriotic voluntarism that removed Garibaldi's adherence to the principles of liberty and democracy from his legacy. In the national discourse developed in the press and school textbooks, Garibaldi was harnessed to the ideological needs of the regime and held up as the embodiment of the Italian people's heroic militarism. However, as this article shows, the eclectic nature of Fascist culture left room for more radical interpretations that did not fit the image of Garibaldi as a ‘disciplined revolutionary’. Particularly among left-wing and younger Fascists, Garibaldi became the precursor of the corporatist revolution, an icon of populism melding values of social transformation, moral intransigence and patriotic self-abnegation. This emphasis on the hero's radical legacy was to reappear glaringly between 1943 and 1945, when the civil war between Fascists and partisans also became a battle over the symbols and memories of the Risorgimento.