Virtual History Museum
This section features photographs of buildings, objects, and vehicles and puts them in their proper historical context.
© Michael Anklin, unless otherwise noted
Content
Ancient and Medieval History
Western European History
British History
World War I
World War II
Vietnamese History
Cuban History
Cold War History
History of the United States
Twenty-first Century History
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Ancient and Medieval History
The Jewry Wall, Leicester, England
The territory from the English Channel to the Central Belt of Scotland was part of the Roman Empire from 43 CE to 410 CE.
The Jewry Wall is the remainder of a large second-century Roman wall of a public building in Leicester, England. It stands next to St. Nicholas’ Circle and St. Nicholas’ Church. In the 1930s, Roman public baths adjacent to the Jewry Wall were excavated. Despite its name, the wall most likely has nothing to do with Judaism. One theory is that it refers to “jurats” (“sworn men”) who met there in early medieval Leicester, the other is that the name may be the result of a common myth that associates unexplained structural remains with Jews. Leicester’s Jewry Wall Museum is located next to the Wall and the unearthed baths.
Peterborough Cathedral, Peterborough, England
The construction of the Cathedral Church of St Peter (hence Peter-burgh = Peterborough), St Paul and St Andrew, popularly known as the Peterborough Cathedral, in Peterborough, England, started over 900 years ago in 1118 and was finished in 1238. Originally, an Anglo-Saxon church and a monastery were built in the same location in around 655 CE and was presumably destroyed by Vikings in 864. A Benedictine Abbey built in 966 was destroyed by an accidental fire in 1116. Two years later, the foundation was laid for a Norman-style cathedral and monastery. After the emergence of the English Gothic architectural style in around 1180, parts of the cathedral, noticeably its impressive West Front, were finished accordingly.
Perhaps most famously, Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536), Queen of England, first wife and queen-consort of Henry VIII, is buried in the cathedral, as were the remains of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) temporarily after her execution in 1587, until they were moved to Westminster Abbey in 1612.
Today the cathedral is the seat of the Anglican Bishop of Peterborough.
Western European History
The Old Port of Marseille
In 600 BCE, Greeks colonists established the first settlement in the cove which is today the Old Port of Marseille, and Marseille has remained center of immigration and commerce ever since.
The Marseille Cathedral
The Marseille Cathedral (Cathédrale Sainte-Marie-Majeure de Marseille) is a Roman Catholic cathedral and a national monument of France, located in Marseille. Remains of an old Romanesque cathedral built in the twelfth century still exist nearby. The enormous new cathedral (it has a capacity of 3,000 seats and thus is one of the larges cathedrals in France) was built in Byzantine-Roman Revival style between 1852 and 1896 in the same location where the cathedrals of Marseille have been located since the fifth century. It has been the seat of the Archdiocese of Marseille since 1948.
Il Duomo di Milano
Il Duomo di Milano, the Milan Cathedral, is the cathedral church of Milan. Its construction lasted almost six hundred years, from 1386 to 1965. The Duomo is the largest church in Italy (St. Peter’s Basilica is in Vatican City), the second largest in Europe, and the fourth largest in the world. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Milan.
A Monument to King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy
In 1896, a monument to King Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878) was erected facing the Duomo in Cathedral Square. From 1861 to 1878, Emmanuel II, until then King of Sardinia, ruled as the first king of a united Italy since the sixth century.
Italy was unified due to the groundwork laid by democratic, republican revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872); three wars of independence (1848–49; 1859; and 1866); the work of Camillo di Cavour (1810–1861), prime minister of Victor Emmanuel II; and the military campaigns of republican revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882).
The process of unification, referred to as Risorgimento (“Resurgence”) started in 1815 (after the Congress of Vienna had returned control of most of Italy to the Austrian Empire), picked up speed during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849, and ended with the capture of Rome in 1870, which became the capital in 1871.
The Speicherstadt, Hamburg, Germany
The Port of Hamburg was founded by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Friedrich I (1122–1190) on May 7, 1189. As Central Europe’s most important commercial harbor for centuries, the port early on in its history led to the rise of a powerful and wealthy middle class.
From 1883 to 1927, the city constructed the Speicherstadt (“City of Warehouses”, a small part of which is pictured above) on oak logs—a custom-free zone to be able to deal with the increasing amount of goods being moved in and out of Hamburg. Still in use today, the Speicherstadt is the largest warehouse district in the world.
The Rickmer Rickmers, Hamburg, Germany
Rickmer Rickmers is a three-masted barque perpetually anchored as a museum ship in Hamburg. It was constructed by the Rickmers shipyard in Bremerhaven in 1896. It used to transport goods to and from Hong Kong and Chile.
The ship was captured by the Portuguese during World War I, who loaned it to the British; it served as a Portuguese school ship until 1960, and was purchased in 1983 by a German organization which gave it back its original name and turned it into a floating museum.
British History
Lincoln, England
The cathedral city of Lincoln is the administrative headquarters of Lincolnshire in the East Midlands of England. The first known settlement in the area was established in the first century BCE. During the Roman presence in Britain, a legionary fortress was built which later became a settlement for retired Roman soldiers, probably around 86 CE. The city’s massive landmark Gothic cathedral was built between 1185 and 1311. According to some historians, it was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548. The city’s other main attraction is the enormous eleventh-century Lincoln Castle built by William the Conqueror.
The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England
The Royal Pavilion, also known as the Brighton Pavilion in Brighton, England, is a former royal palace built as a retreat for King George IV between 1787 and 1820 in the Indo-Saracenic style predominant in India during most of the nineteenth century. King William IV, and Queen Victoria also frequented the Pavilion during their respective reigns. It was sold to the city of Brighton in 1850, and in April 2020 became the property of the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust.
The Pavilion is a reminder of European imperialists’ fascination with the people and cultures they ruled—architectural Orientalism (see Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978), so to speak. The British East India Company directly or indirectly ruled large parts of the subcontinent starting in the early seventeenth century. The British Crown took over from 1858 until partition and independence in 1947.
World War I
World War I tank replica
In the Imperial War Museum in London a replica of a British World War I tank is about to descend into a model Western Front trench.
The British were the first to build tanks and use them in 1916. Although designs for tanks had existed for a long time (indeed, Leonardo da Vinci designed but not built a prototype in 1487), the enormous casualties and the brutality of trench warfare at the Western Front had engineers in Britain, France, and Germany seek to build an armored all-terrain fighting vehicle that could easily move across the trenches and help break the deadlock that had existed since October 1914.
However, tanks failed to make a decisive difference during most of World War I. Tank drivers and gunners had a very limited view of the battle field, and tanks often got stuck in the trenches.
Tanks mostly had a psychological effect on the enemy, particularly when German soldiers first saw British tanks on the battlefield. Many soldiers on all sides were already dealing with was then called shell shock (post-traumatic stress disorder).
During World War I, this condition was for the first time recognized as a serious psychological ailment that was the result of soldiers witnessing a particularly gruesome event.
One can only image how already mentally frail combatants would have reacted to a massive war machine suddenly roaring toward them through a wall of gun smoke.
Tanks eventually did make difference during the German Spring Offensive (March–July 1918) and the Allies’ more successful Hundred Days Offensive (August–November 1918) that ended the war. Allied tanks played key role during the Battle of Amiens (8–12 August 1918).
Mephisto
The first tanks in World War I were essentially mobile fortified multiple machine gun nests, as this German A7V tank shows. The A7V tank was the only German-produced tank during World War I, and only 20 were used in combat from March to October 1918. The lone surviving specimen is Mephisto, exhibited at the museum of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, Australia.
The Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia
The Australian War Memorial, located in Australia’s capital, Canberra, was opened in 1941 and houses a large military history museum with exhibits covering all the conflicts in which troops of the Australian Commonwealth fought.
Damaged 4.7-inch naval gun barrel
This 4.7-inch naval gun barrel (Heavy Battery, 1 Australian Division) was damaged in the Gallipoli Campaign (19 February 1915–9 January 1916), during which Entente forces failed to capture the capital of the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), Constantinople. Unsuccessful naval attacks on Turkish forts in the Dardanelles were followed by a disastrous amphibious landing on the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula.
The then Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill was responsible for the planning of this catastrophic campaign that cost the lives of approximately 46,000 Entente soldiers, more than 11,000 of whom were Australians and New Zealanders. Although the Turks won the battle, over 50,000 Ottoman soldiers died.
One of the commanders responsible for the Ottoman victory was Mustafa Kemal, who as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (the name means “father of the Turks”) would go on to establish the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and serve as its first president until his death in 1938.
The Gallipoli campaign thus has been of lasting national importance in Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand.
Left behind on the battlefield
Abandoned handguns and a damaged British helmet left behind at the Battle of Gallipoli. (AWM)
ANZAC biscuit tin
ANZAC stands for The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps which was created in Egypt in December 1914. They fought against the Turks during the Gallipoli campaign. Following the Allied evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1916, the corps was transformed into the I ANZAC Corps and II ANZAC Corps, both of which operated until 1917 before being integrated into other units of the British Empire. An ANZAC corps was briefly reestablished during World War II and fought in the Battle of Greece in 1941.
To commemorate the unnecessary slaughter of so many Australians and New Zealanders at the Battle of Gallipoli, ANZAC Day was first observed in Australia and New Zealand on April 25, 1916 and has been on that day every year since. Today, all Australian and New Zealander combat veterans are remembered on ANZAC Day.
According to legend, wives and women’s groups sent sweet oat biscuits to the ANZAC troops stationed in Europe during World War I. They have become known as ANZAC biscuits and today are sold commercially.
Every year, in anticipation of ANZAC Day, the Royal New Zealand Returned Services’ Association (RSA) and the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) hold fundraisers during which they sell ANZAC biscuits. The company UNIBIC sells the biscuits in old-fashioned tins with different artwork every year. This tin is from 2017.
World War II
Another ANZAC biscuit tin
Between July and November 1942, Australian and Papuan troops fought Japanese forces in what was then the Australian Territory of Papua. It was a land campaign fought along what became known as the Kokoda Trail. The Japanese attempted to conquer the Australian colony’s capital Port Moresby by moving south along the trail through the jungle toward the city. When a lack of supplies forced the Japanese to retreat, Australian and Papuan troops pursued them, moving north along the trail.
Thousands of soldiers on both sides suffered from tropical diseases during the campaign. After the Japanese were forced back, US General Douglas MacArthur set up his headquarters in Port Moresby from November 1942 to October 1944.
The Enigma machine
The German-made Enigma encryption machine enabled Nazi Germany to hide its communication from its enemies. In 1932, Polish experts first managed to decipher a number of German messages, but the real breakthrough happened in Britain during the war. Mathematician Alan Turing, whom many consider the father of theoretical computer science, led a team of British code-breakers who built a machine that was able to decrypt German messages. Turing and his team thus contributed greatly to the eventual Allied victory and by some estimates helped shorten the war by two years.
Imperial War Museum London (IWM).
V-1 rocket
One of Nazi Germany’s V-1 flying rockets, which played a part in the Nazis’ unsuccessful attempt to turn the tide by deploying new weapons toward the end of World War II (AWM).
A World War II Allied bomber
Inside a World War II Allied bomber
The Kindertransport
During the nine months before World War II, 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig were brought to the United Kingdom and placed in foster homes and hostels. Many of them would be the only ones in their families to survive the Holocaust. This became known as the Kindertransport (German for “children’s transport”). An outdoor bronze memorial sculpture by artist Frank Meisler called Kindertransport – The Arrival was installed in the forecourt of Liverpool Street station in London in 2006.
Vietnamese History
Chùa Thiên Mụ Pagoda, Huế, Vietnam
The Chùa Thiên Mụ Pagoda in the former imperial city of Huế was built in 1601.
In a fraudulent election in 1955, Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm removed the head of state of the southern State of Vietnam, Bảo Đại (the former Vietnamese Emperor and one-time puppet ruler for the French) from power. Diệm established the Republic of Vietnam with himself as president. The autocratic Diệm was a devout Catholic and anti-communist. He brutally oppressed the Buddhist majority in the country.
During the summer of 1963, demonstrations against Diệm’s oppression of Buddhists broke out across South Vietnam with Buddhist monasteries like Chùa Thiên Mụ Pagoda in the city of Huế becoming the foci of anti-government activity. Diệm was executed during a military coup in November of that year.
A different kind of Swastika
The Swastika, the symbol most people in the West associate with the genocidal Nazi regime, has been used in many different cultures and religions for thousands of years, including in Buddhism, as this railing at the Chùa Thiên Mụ Pagoda shows.
Thích Quảng Đức
Thích Quảng Đức was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death in Saigon on June 11, 1963 in protest of Diệm’s repressive policies toward Buddhists. The international community was outraged and Diệm promised reforms, which were never implemented. Instead, repression against Buddhists was stepped up until a US-backed coup removed Diệm from power.
The car in which Thích Quảng Đức traveled to his self-immolation is on display at the Chùa Thiên Mụ Pagoda.
The Củ Chi Tunnels
In their struggle against US forces, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (FNL, French: Front National de Libération; called Viet-Cong, which essentially means “Vietnamese Commies”, by its enemies) built what became known as the Củ Chi Tunnels in the Củ Chi District of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City).
It was an enormous network of connected tunnels that included kitchens, hospitals, and living quarters (especially for North Vietnamese soldiers who had come South to fight). The tunnels were also used to hide during combat, to move supplies, store weapons, and to communicate with other units.
Some Vietnamese soldiers spent weeks at a time inside these tunnels populated by ants, scorpions, spiders, and snakes. Many got severely sick and some died from malaria and other diseases.
The images above and below show just how narrow the original tunnel entrances were.
Today, a small part of the network can be visited by tourists for whose access the tunnels have been enlarged. One can only imagine how little space there must have been inside before they were widened so the average Westerner could fit inside them.
Vietnamese fighters would often seemingly appear out of nowhere, kill or wound US soldiers and disappear back into the tunnels, adding to the myth of the resistance fighters’ invisibility.
Even once the US military was aware of the tunnels, GIs were often simply to large to enter them.
If US soldiers found tunnel entries, they would often simply throw grenades inside. The tunnels nevertheless greatly aided the Vietnamese in their fight against the US.
In a museum next to the accessible part of the tunnels, one can see how they were structured.
The entire network of tunnels was dug by hand with simple tools.
Booby traps
Aside from tunnels, the National Liberation Front also constructed various booby traps would severely main or kill anyone unlucky enough to be hit by them (in the case of the one depicted above) or step on them (as in the case of the two examples below).
The Mỹ Lai Massacre
The monument commemorating the Mỹ Lai Massacre.
On March 16, 1968, U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division brutally murdered hundreds of women, children, infants, and old people, and gang-raped and mutilated women, including girls as young as 12 in the in two hamlets of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi Province.
No National Liberation Front fighters or North Vietnamese soldiers were present in the village before the attack. No shots had been fired at the US troops.
U.S. Army maps had identified the hamlets as Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khê. The war crime thus became known as the Mỹ Lai Massacre in the US, but as the Sơn Mỹ Massacre in Vietnam.
Of the twenty-six soldiers charged with criminal offenses, only platoon leader Lieutenant William Calley Jr. was found guilty of killing 22 villagers, convicted and given a life sentence. Yet, three days after the verdict, President Nixon ordered Calley released, and he only served three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
When thanks to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh the massacre became known to the wider public in November 1969, it caused outrage around the world and contributed to the growth of opposition to the war in the United States, especially once it became clear that military authorities had tried to cover it up.
US helicopter crew members Glenn Andreotta, Lawrence Colburn, and Hugh Thompson Jr. were the only three men present at the massacre who tried to stop the slaughter and did manage to save some lives. As a result, they were met with hostility from fellow soldiers and some US politicians.
The three men were finally awarded the Soldier’s Medal for their bravery in 1998—thirty years after the massacre. Andreotta received the honors posthumously. He died in combat in April 1968, less than a month after the massacre. He was twenty years old.
In 1978, a memorial and museum was built at the site of the massacre.
Among the features of the memorial is a shelter in which women and children tried to hide unsuccessfully from the murderers.
The view the victims would have had from inside the shelter, shortly before they were murdered.
After the war, some US veterans returned to Vietnam trying to make amends by helping to rebuild the country. Some of the men donated the medals they had received during the war as part of their apology to the Vietnamese people. These medals are displayed in the museum at the Mỹ Lai memorial.
A close-up of the monument commemorating the war crime committed at Mỹ Lai.
Zippo lighters in the valley of the shadow of death
Street vendors in Vietnam sell all sorts of things to tourists, including cigarette lighters left behind by American GIs.
While they also sell replicas that are advertised as such, I was assured in 1998 that this was an original lighter from the war. Whether or not this is true is of secondary importance.
US soldiers did carry engraved lighters like this one, and they can tell us a lot about the mindset of many of those who fought in Vietnam.
This soldier—or a soldier who would have carried such a lighter—was stationed in the south-eastern Tay Ninh Province, or its capital city of the same name, about 90 km to the northwest of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City) from 1967 to 1968.
The engraved words VIET-NAM – U.S.A. and the US and South Vietnamese flags are supposed to show the friendship between the two countries and between their respective military forces, which were both fighting against the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army.
The reverse tells a different story.
The heat and humidity, tropical diseases, booby traps, and the often invisible enemy weighed heavily on the psyche of soldiers whose exact mission in Vietnam remained unclear. The US civilian and military leadership was unable to explain what exactly a complete American victory in Vietnam would actually have entailed. Thus, many doubted that such a victory, no matter what it would have looked like, was even possible.
Rampant drug addiction and venereal disease among GIs made things worse.
Thus, this engraving of a distorted Bible quote may imply more than a dark sense of humor and speak to the murderous mindset of many US soldiers in Vietnam:
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
“I will fear no evil
“For I am the evilest son of bitch in the valley”
The former US embassy
The former US Embassy building in Saigon, which was demolished in April 1998. From April 29 to April 30, 1975, 978 U.S. and 1,120 Vietnamese and third-country nationals were evacuated by helicopters landing on the embassy’s rooftop. They were among the 7,000 Americans and Vietnamese who were evacuated by helicopter from Saigon before its capture by National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975.
Four-hundred evacuees, including over 100 South Korean citizens, were left behind at the embassy. Those who remained in the building may very well have witnessed the first North Vietnamese tank crashing through the gates of the embassy through these windows.
Cuban History
A monument to the USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba
An explosion sank the armored cruiser in 1898, killing three fourths of its crew.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Latin American colonies of European powers were gaining their independence. In 1823, US President James Monroe made it clear that the US would not tolerate any renewed European control of territories in the Americas, but would not interfere with older colonies that still remained under European control. This became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
By the late nineteenth century, Spain had lost all its colonies in the Americas, except for Puerto Rico and Cuba. And, although the latter was still a Spanish colony, it exported nearly twelve times as many goods to the US as it did to Spain. The US was also keen to expand its influence in the Caribbean because they wanted to build a canal in Nicaragua or Panama and knew they would need local harbors for naval support. The US thus began supporting independence movements in Cuba.
Cuba fought three independence wars against Spain during the nineteenth century (from 1868 to 1878; 1879 to 1880; and 1895 to 1898). Toward the end of the latter, in January 1898, US President William McKinley sent the armored cruiser USS Maine to the harbor of Havana to protect American interests. On the evening of February 15, an explosion sank the ship, killing 261 people—three fourths of its crew.
To this day it has not been conclusively proven what caused the explosion. At the time, however, a US investigation concluded on March 28 that the ship had been hit by a mine. A Spanish investigation came to the conclusion that an explosion inside the ship had sunk it.
Egged on by an angry US public and a sensationalist press in the Unites States, which often fabricated entire stories about atrocities, the US government had to act. On April 20, the US gave Spain an ultimatum to grant Cuba independence. On April 21, Spain ended diplomatic relations with the US, and the US Navy blockaded the island. On April 23, Spain declared war on the US, whose Congress responded in kind on April 25.
The US won the Spanish-American War which was fought in the Caribbean and the South Pacific and lasted a little over three months. As a result, Puerto Rico and Guam became US territories, the Philippines a US colony, and Cuba a protectorate of the United States. In 1902, Cuba gained independence, but the newly created Republic of Cuba remained essentially a client state of the US.
The anchor chain of the USS Maine next to the monument
“Capitan” Gregorio Fuentes
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) lived in Cuba for several longer periods of time in the 1940s and 1950s. Gregorio Fuentes (1897–2002) was the first mate of Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar.
During the final years of his life, “Capitan” Gregorio Fuentes, as he called himself, welcomed tourists in his home in the Cojímar district of Havana. For 10 or 20 dollars one could take pictures of or with him and listen to him tell stories about his friendship with Hemingway.
Fuentes and his family claimed that Gregorio was the inspiration for the character of “the old man” in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), although this has never been proven, and Hemingway himself said that the character was not based on anyone in particular.
These pictures of Fuentes were taken in January 2001. He died a year later on January 22, 2002, at the age of 104.
“Yank Tanks”
After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Cuban government stopped importing American cars and only bought vehicles from the Soviet Union. However, Cubans who already owned American cars, were allowed to keep them, and many kept them running over the years by any means necessary.
Since 2011, Cubans have been allowed to buy used post-1959 cars, and as of December 2013, they have been able buy new cars from state-run car dealers.
However, one can still see US models from the 1950s driving around the streets of Cuba.
Ever since the 1960s, Cuban drivers have figured out ways to keep those old cars going.
Victory in Santa Clara
After years of guerrilla warfare, Cuban rebels led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara overthrew the US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Before rebels captured Havana, a train with reinforcements for Batista was on its way to the capital, but was derailed by Che Guevara and his troops in Santa Clara. The battle that followed dealt the final blow to Batista’s regime. Batista fled with his family to the Dominican Republic. The rebels had won.
Parts of the derailed train were left in place in Santa Clara and made into a monument to Che’s victory.
The Bay of Pigs
Initially, the US hoped Fidel Castro would be a democratic ruler. But after Castro installed a Soviet-supported communist government 103 miles off the coast of Florida, US government officials began thinking of ways to remove Castro without going to war with the Soviet Union, which during the Cold War (1947–1991) would have meant nuclear annihilation of much of the world.
They decided that the CIA would secretly train 1,400 Cuban exiles and have them invade the island. Once the Cuban people, encouraged by this invasion, rose up against Castro, the US would simply be providing air support to one faction in a Cuban civil war and could thereby avoid being seen as having invaded a Soviet ally.
Plans for this invasion, which would start in the Cuban Bay of Pigs, were developed under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but were executed early in John F. Kennedy’s presidency in April 1961.
The campaign was a complete disaster. Most Cubans were quite happy with Castro and did not rise up to support the invaders. The US also failed to keep the plans a secret, and 20,000 Cuban soldiers were waiting for the 1,400 intruders. 106 Cuban exiles and US advisers were killed. The rest were imprisoned. Many were later exchanged for American goods Cuba desperately needed. The whole affair ended up being a giant embarrassment for the Kennedy administration and the US, and a propaganda coup for the communist camp.
There is now a museum in the Bay of Pigs, where parts of destroyed airplanes and other US vehicles and equipment are on display.
Communist architecture
Fidel Castro’s regime survived not only the Bay of Pigs invasion, but also the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (during which the world came to the brink of nuclear war due to Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in Cuba, which were ultimately remove) and countless assassination attempts on Castro. He died of natural causes in 2016 at the age of 90.
After the successful revolution, Cuba ceased to be a client state of the US and a playground for American mobsters. Yet, despite receiving billions of dollars of Soviet aid until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Cuba remained a poor country with many of its buildings decaying. It also turned into a Soviet-style dictatorship and has imprisoned and executed thousands of political opponents over the years.
Cuba’s friendship with the Soviet Union was perhaps nowhere more visible than in the former Soviet, now Russian, embassy’s Stalinist, Brutalist architecture.
In 2001, many hotels in Cuba still resembled each other, as they had all been built in the same distinctly communist style.
Che Guevara
Images of Che Guevara are omnipresent in Cuba. Ernesto Guevara was a medical doctor who was born in Argentina in 1928. As a medical student, he traveled through Latin America. Outraged by the poverty he witnessed, he became a convinced Marxist-Leninist. He later met Raúl Castro and his older brother Fidel and accompanied them to Cuba where they started their campaign of guerrilla warfare against the American-backed dictator Batista.
Guevara became know as “Che” because the word is used as an interjection in Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish, meaning “hey!” or “guy!”. The Argentine Guevara used it regularly to address his Cuban comrades, who in turned teased him about it and started referring to him as “Che”. The nickname stuck.
From November 1959 to February 1961, Che was the President of the Central Bank of Cuba.
Cubans still sell old bank notes to tourist with Che’s signature on them.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cuban government legalized the US dollar in Cuba. In 2001, the Cuban peso was practically worthless. But it featured Che Guevara on the front and back, so Cubans sold it for one US dollar to tourists as a souvenir.
The reverse showed Che cutting sugar cane. Communist leaders often let themselves be photographed doing ordinary work to show how close they were to the masses.
Three peso coins with Che’s face on them were also sold to tourists.
Che was not ready to be a Cuban bureaucrat for the rest of his life. He strongly believed that communist revolutions had to happen around the world to free the impoverished masses from the oppressive forces of capitalism.
So, he left Cuba to support the Marxist Simba rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an endeavor, which, by his own admission was a complete failure. In 1966, he traveled to Bolivia with plans of overthrowing its US-backed dictatorship and hoping that this would trigger communist revolutions across Latin America.
Che had a difficult time recruiting soldiers for his guerrilla army in Bolivia. With the help of the CIA, Bolivian government forces eventually tracked him down and executed him in October 1967.
As a result of Che biographer Jon Lee Andersen’s research, Che’s remains were located in the Bolivia in 1997 and repatriated to Cuba where they were laid to rest with military honors in a giant mausoleum built in his honor.
The small wooden casket with Che’s remains.
Cold War History
The remnants of communism
Since the end of the Cold War, communist uniforms and other memorabilia have been for sale in many places. Including in Berlin, where this Red Army hat was sold in the late 1990s.
I often bring it to class and hand it around to introduce the history of communism.
I direct student’s attention to the insignia and ask them what the hammer and sickle may have symbolized.
History of the United States
The Black Panther Party
Late in his life, the former Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), gave invited lectures about his life and US politics at American universities.
Cleaver was expelled from the BPP in 1971, after a falling out with Huey Newton who did not agree with Cleaver’s advocacy of violent revolution.
He went underground after his involvement in an attack on an Oakland police officer during which two officers were wounded and a member of the Panthers was killed. Cleaver spent seven years in exile in Cuba, Algeria, and France. After his return to the US, he first became a born-again Christian and finally a Mormon.
At the end of his university lectures, he would hand out signed copies of his FBI wanted posters.
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Pontalba Buildings make up two sides of Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. They were built in the late 1840s by the Baroness Micaela Almonester Pontalba. There are restaurants and shops on the ground floors. The upper floor apartments are often said to be the oldest continuously-rented apartments in the United States. However, they were originally built as row houses and were turned into apartments during the Great Depression.
A steamboat on the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana. Steamboats played a central role in the development of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century by transporting people and goods up and down the river. Today they are mostly used for tourist excursions.
Small town, USA
A storefront in Huntingburg, Indiana. Due to the creation of the Interstate Highway System and the construction of shopping malls in the United States after World War II, main street commerce suffered in rural small towns across the country, with many businesses closing or thenceforth catering only to tourists.
In such small towns, one cannot only find quaint façades like this…
…but also desolate exteriors with ghostly windows and doors one cannot enter.
Twenty-first Century History
September 11, 2001
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1996.
The One and Two World Financial Center buildings seen from the Twin Towers in 1996.
The Twin Towers’ steel beams seen from below in 1996.
US President George W. Bush used the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. After Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, who had had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, was toppled, his effigies were destroyed or, in the case of the mosaic below, dismantled, reassembled and exhibited at the Imperial War Museum London.
