… have been honored with statues in your city? Kind of a poll/civic awareness test.
Anyway I live in Honolulu and we have
Local
[King Kamehameha I](have been honored with statues in your city?) - Our most famous statue. King David Kalakaua - Famous for being drunk thus the Merrie Monarch Festival. Queen Lydia Liliuokalani - Our last monarch. If you find her in the 1900 or 1910 census you’ll see her occupation as “ex-Queen.” Her statue is a little hard to find.
Prince Jonah Kuhio - A new statue not to far from Duke. One of our early Territorial representatives. Princess Victoria Kaiulani - I live a couple blocks from this. In fact I can see it from my window. The main reason she has a statue is that she died young and tragic and they wanted to pretty up the park that runs by the road named after her. Duke Kahanamoku - He wasn’t a duke, that’s just his name. Arguably our greatest sports figure. Father Damien - He’s famous for helping the lepers in Kalaupapa and then dying from the disease himself. He’s since been beatified. Robin Williams was even thinking about playing him in a dramatic movie but I’m pretty sure that project’s dead.
National
Oddly I don’t think we have any statues honoring National figures.
International
Sun Yat-Sen - The Chinese revolutionary leader who was defeated by Mao and fled to Taiwan. You know, I didn’t know he spent time in Hawaii. Mahatma Ghandi - I think we know why he’s famous. I don’t know which came first, the statue or the elephants that Indira gave us? Probably the statue, Gandhi said some really nice things about Father Damien. Jose Rizal - A famous Filipino nationalist. Executed by Spain.
There may be others but these are the ones I see on an almost daily basis from the street.
Well, living in Los Angeles County, I know that there’s got to be plenty of statues 'round these parts, yet I can only seem to recall one that’s nearby. It’s of Amelia Earheart, in North Hollywood. Apparently (according to the SO), she had lived in the area for some time.
Sun Yat-Sen died several years before Mao began his rise to real power - He was a revolutionary leader and the architect of China’s first non-Imperial government. He became China’s first provisional president for two months in 1911, after the successful rebellion against the Qing, before resigning the post. Later he became director of the Kuomintang party, rebelling in 1913 ( unsuccessfully ) against his successor as president, Yuan Shih-kai, who had become increasingly dictatorial. Returned to China in 1917 after a few years of exhile in Japan, and established a KMT powerbase in southern China by 1921. Formed alliance with Chinese communists ( and accepted aid from the USSR ) starting in 1924. After he died in 1927, both the Communists and KMT, though soon fiercely at odds, claimed to be his spiritual heirs. He’s perhaps the one universal hero of modern China ( well, accept maybe among the old Qing Imperial family ).
Hartford has a prominent statue of Lafayette that you’ll see when you get off I-84 near the Capitol. My suburb is the home of Noah Webster so we’ve got a statue of him in our town’s center. Outside those two we don’t have much in the way of statuary, but we’re bound to put up a Ron Francis one sooner or later.
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