Obama changes the name of tallest mountain from Mt McKinley to Denali

2015-08-31T15:49:00-04:00

The Obama administration will change the name of North America's tallest mountain peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, the White House said Sunday, a major symbolic gesture to Alaska Natives on the eve of President Barack Obama's historic visit to Alaska. By renaming the peak Denali, an Athabascan word meaning "the high one," Obama waded into a sensitive and decades-old conflict between residents of Alaska and Ohio.

"Alaskans have informally called the mountain Denali for years, but the federal government recognizes its name invoking the 25th president, William McKinley, who was born in Ohio and assassinated early in his second term."

China furious over US plan to rename street in front of its embassy after dissident

2014-06-25T19:14:00-04:00

Chinese diplomats on Wednesday said Congress’ decision to rename the street in front of Beijing’s embassy in the U.S. capital after a Chinese dissident is "really absurd" [...] On Tuesday the House Appropriations Committee voted to rename the street outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” — after a Chinese dissident who received the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia and is currently serving an 11-year prison term for subverting the government’s authority.

This is not the first time that place-naming – or toponymy – has provoked a political dispute. Actually, it's pretty likely that as long as people have been naming places, other people have been getting upset about it. For example, as immortalized by Jimmy Kennedy in the classic song, Istanbul has been called Constantinople, Byzantium, and Stamboul among other names. What isn't mentioned in the song is that these name changes signal major political shifts, in particular the waves of (often violent) colonization by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Turks. More recently Russian cities were renamed to commemorate Soviet leaders, then changed back to their older names following the collapse of the USSR. Likewise, after the Arab Spring, squares and streets in Tunis and Cairo were renamed to obliterate mention the deposed dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak, respectively.

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Obama changes the name of tallest mountain from Mt McKinley to Denali

China furious over US plan to rename street in front of its embassy after dissident