Browse Exhibits (2 total)
The War in the Shadows
War in the ‘shadows’ captures how the Cold War was often fought clandestinely, through proxies or waged inside the realm of culture. The prototypical soldier in the Cold War was not the infantryman of conflicts past, but the spy. From 1945-1991, ‘spooks’ worked not just for the official security services, but for international agencies and multinational corporations. Their impact in driving historical events was most evident in their spectacular failures when their ‘black ops’ misfired, bringing the conspiracy into the light. The assassination of the Diem brothers, the leaking of the blue prints for the Manhattan project or the floundering of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, however, belies the fact that not only did many covert missions achieve their desired strategic objective, but also their prime directive of remaining safely under the radar. The covert nature of the Cold War represents an underappreciated historiographical problem. Historians reconstruct the past through primary sources. What do you when the critical events that drove the collapse of a Third World regime or the death of a foreign leader remain shrouded behind a veil of secrecy?
Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva
The Congo Crisis 1959-1965
The Congo Crisis was a pivotal event in terms of decolonization, the Cold War in Africa and postcolonial national building. Contemporary media accounts, and the early historiography of the Congo Crisis, downplayed the clandestine subversion of the Lumumba government and the neocolonial initiatives adopted by various foreign actors. This exhibit digs into the war in the shadows, trying to illuminate the secret networks connecting outside actors with local agents. Various collections focus on key actors like Moise Tshombe, Union Miniere du Haut Katanga and the National Bank of Belgium. Mining various primary and secondary sources enables us to reconstruct the complex ties connecting various actors and reassess traditional narratives about what happened in the Congo.