Spies, Traitors & Saboteurs, Fear and Freedom in America is a new exhibit at the Tampa Bay History Center.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Are you willing to give up your civil liberties to be safe? That's the question a new exhibit asks at the Tampa Bay History Center.
The attacks on 9/11 are what many Americans think of when they hear the word "terrorism." But the act dates back much further to the war of 1812 and the burning of Washington D.C.
"It was burned by the British, including the White House, so the little scene setup is a scene of the White House dining room after it had been burned," says Rodney Kite-Powell, curator of history at the Tampa Bay History Center.
This is the first scene at the new exhibit Spies, Traitors & Saboteurs, Fear and Freedom in America.
"It really takes people on a tour of the history of our country as it pertains to terrorist acts, espionage, and spying and things like that," says Kite-Powell.
The traveling exhibit from the International Spy Museum takes you through World War I and German espionage to the Ku Klux Klan and Kite-Powell says it begs the question: Are we willing to sacrifice our civil liberties to keep groups from harming us?
"The information provided in the exhibit gives people the tools to answer the question about trading civil liberties for safety."
That information is available in sections like the Red Scare. This section of the exhibit allows you to go through the FBI files of people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, and Marilyn Monroe to give you an idea of the different documents the FBI was collecting and why exactly those people were being investigated.
"There's the balance of that little bit of the absurdity, being concerned about Eleanor Roosevelt, but the idea that these people were doing a great job and they were finding people who were out to get us," says Kite-Powell.
You'll see the faces of people who wanted to do harm to our country and video of when our beliefs were under attack, leading to a time when the past doesn't seem that far from the present.
"We have to remember those kinds of things, however horrific they are, have happened to some degree over the course of our history and as a country we've learned to overcome those tragedies and heal as a country," says Kite-Powell.
You can see Spies, Traitors and Saboteurs through June 24. Click here for times and location: http://www.tampabayhistorycenter.org/index.html