What's a Legation? Why is it in Tangier? Really, it's the only US National Historic Landmark overseas?
These are but a few of the recurring questions we get at TALIM, from Americans, Moroccans, and visitors from around the world.
So we have finally gotten around to installing "backlit transparencies" in a previously unused staircase that will be the start of a circuit through the museum.
Images, documents, and texts that help trace Moroccan – American relations, beginning with Sultan Sidi Mohammed's inclusion of "the Americans" among Morocco's trading partners, in 1777.
And of course no timeline would be complete without giving due credit to Sultan Moulay Suleiman, who in 1821 gave America its first diplomatic property abroad, the American Legation in Tangier.
The coming months will see further displays of history coming out of the archives and on to our walls.
There are so many stories to tell: one of them is the Legation's role in the Operation Torch landings of November 1942, seventy years ago. When the Legation was overflowing with diplomats, military attachés, and OSS agents. And when Tangier was more like the Casablanca of film fame, a place where refugees hoped to get passage onward to a neutral safe haven or to rejoin the war effort.
More history to come!
Gerald Loftus
