Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army since 1910, before and during World War II. Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 to as high as 410,000. Many of the women were...

Commissioned as part of the 1964 New York World's Fair, the Unisphere is a spherical stainless steel representation of the Earth, located in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in the borough of Queens, New York City. It measures 140 feet high and 120 feet in diameter....

John Lewis moved to Atlanta as a founding leader of SNCC— the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—with an impressive resume as an activist. As a Fisk University student he’d been arrested for leading sit-ins and protests. In 1961 he helped spearhead the Freedom...

The sister city relationship between Arlington, Texas and Bad Königshofen in Bavaria began when a German official on an exchange program stopped in Arlington and related how hard things were in his city. Not only were they suffering from post-war shortages, but their...

Hyde Park was the home of Franklin Roosevelt. Outside the Presidential Library, in the Freedom Plaza, is BreakFree, constructed of pieces of the Berlin Wall (which fell in November, 1989.) It was installed in 1994. The sculpture is by Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of...

The Christmas Truce Memorial was dedicated by The Duke of Cambridge Prince Harry on December 12, 2014, the 100th anniversary of an informal truce between British and German troops in the trenches of France during World War I, in which they sang carols, exchanged gifts...

This Tribute to Human Rights, by Mariano González Beltrán, was dedicated on December 15, 2004 and is located in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Composed of numerous figures cast in bronze and arranged in a circle, it represents "a society that lives in harmony, in harmony...

On December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, which held its fifth General Assembly at the Palais de Chaillot, in Paris. In 1985, at the entrance of the forecourt, an engraved slab was dedicated and the esplanade was...

Commissioned by the city, artists Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz described their design as a Gegen-Denkmal––a countermonument. They rejected the city of Hamburg's offer to place it in a park and instead constructed it in a pedestrian shopping mall in the...

It is perhaps a stretch to call the Teddy Roosevelt memorial a peace monument, as the only reference to peace on the four slabs that are engraved with his quotations falls not on the side of peace. "If I must chose between righteousness and peace, I chose righteous,"...

At a peaceCENTER's meeting last week we were talking about the postal service and Andy quoted this poem, engraved on the pediments of the old District of Columbia Post office, now the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, at N. Capitol & Massachusetts Ave, NE, on...

The Carn Heddwch (Peace Cairn) was constructed on Mynydd Llanfihangel Rhos y Corn, Carmarthenshire, in the Autumn of 2007. It has the word peace carved in four languages: Arabic, English, Hebrew and Welsh on different sides of the monument. The children of Brechfa...

This monument recalls the brutal murder of seven young black activists by South African security forces in 1986. The young men were on their way to what they believed to be a job interview in a minivan driven by an undercover security officer, when they stopped at a...

On the campus of the University for Peace (the only university chartered by the United Nations) this monument, sculpted by Cuban artist Thelvia Marín in 1987, includes nine 12-foot columns hosting a sculpture on each side. The columns are lined up in a spiral,...

The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign,...