Yesterday In Travel

Today we discuss the Soviet Revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s exile in Mexico, his relationship with artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and his ultimate murder by ice pick at the hands of an agent of Stalin’s secret police.

On today's episode, we discuss a physical connection that happened in travel history: the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad in the United States and, specifically, the moment that the East Coast connected with the West coast at Promontory Point, Utah. It was a monumental undertaking that proved to be a pivotal moment for the country. It forever altered where and how Americans lived, and sparked a new era of trade and leisure travel. Unfortunately, it also quickened the pace of environmental degradation and subjugation of the native peoples of North America. 

For this episode, we speak to special guest Sean Fraga, PhD, a historian of the North American west and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at USC. He's currently working on his first book about the transcontinental railroad, Asian trade, and the Puget Sound, which will be published by Yale University press. 

On today’s episode, we discuss the successful launch and orbit of Sputnik, the USSR’s unmanned satellite experiment, in October of 1957. The feat achieved a first in human-powered space flight and sparked the technological and ideological competition between the U.S. and the Soviets known as the “Space Race.” The fact that the Soviets beat the Americans into orbit had huge consequences on the psyche of the U.S. for decades to come, and the competitive nature of space exploration continues to this day. Is outer space the next commercial travel frontier? 

On today's episode we explore a moment of travel history from our own backyard—New York City. We get into the story of when Fidel Castro visited Harlem in September 1961. This was not only a big moment in travel history—few foreign leaders, if any, had paid a visit to Harlem before Casto—but it also tells us a lot about racial politics during the Cold War.

In this episode we jump back about 17 years into history—to 2004, when the Colombian city of Medellin unveiled a new mass transit system called the MetroCable. The network of gondolas improved accessibility to once remote hillside neighborhoods, transforming the way the city’s residents mix and helping to garner international attention for the city’s innovative strategies for urban social improvement. The gondolas also became a tourist draw in their own right.