Although the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 shocked the world, America has confronted terrorism at home for well over a century. With the invention of dynamite in 1866, Americans began to worry about anonymous acts of mass violence in a way that differed from previous generations' fears of urban riots, slave uprisings, and mob violence. Focusing on the volatile period between the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1920 bombing outside J. P. Morgan's Wall Street office, Jeffory Clymer argues that economic and cultural displacements caused by the expansion of industrial capitalism directly influenced evolving ideas about terrorism. In America's Culture of Terrorism, Clymer uncovers the roots of American terrorism and its impact on American identity by exploring the literary works of Henry James, Ida B. Wells, Jack London, Thomas Dixon, and Covington Hall, as well as trial transcripts, media reports, and the cultural rhetoric surrounding terrorist acts of the day. He demonstrates that the rise of mass media and the pressures of the industrial wage-labor economy both fueled the development of terrorism and shaped society's response to it. His analysis not only sheds new light on American literature and culture a century ago but also offers insights into the contemporary understanding of terrorism.

This scathing critique of U.S. political culture is a brilliant analysis of the Iran-contra scandal. Chomsky offers a message of hope, reminding us that resistance is possible, necessary, and effective.

Introduction: The Politics of Memory in the Post-9/11 Era -- Monuments and Voids: The Proliferation of 9/11 Memory -- The Objects That Lived, the Voices That Remain: The 9/11 Museum -- Global Architecture, Patriotic Skyscrapers, and a Cathedral Shopping Mall: The Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan -- Visibility and Erasure: Memory and the "Global War on Terror" -- The Memory of Racial Terror: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum.

The Fox-TV series 24 might have been in production long before its premier just two months after 9/11, but its storyline—and that of many other television programs—has since become inextricably embedded in the nation's popular consciousness. This book marks the first comprehensive survey and analysis of War on Terror themes in post-9/11 American television, critiquing those shows that—either blindly or intentionally—supported the Bush administration's security policies. Stacy Takacs focuses on the role of entertainment programming in building a national consensus favoring a War on Terror, taking a close look at programs that comment both directly and allegorically on the post-9/11 world. In show after show, she chillingly illustrates how popular television helped organize public feelings of loss, fear, empathy, and self-love into narratives supportive of a controversial and unprecedented war. Takacs examines a spectrum of program genres—talk shows, reality programs, sitcoms, police procedurals, male melodramas, war narratives—to uncover the recurrent cultural themes that helped convince Americans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and compromise their own civil liberties. Spanning the past decade of the ongoing conflict, she reviews not only key touchstones of post-9/11 popular culture such as 24, Rescue Me, and Sleeper Cell, but also less remarked-upon but relevant series like JAG, Off to War, Six Feet Under, and Jericho. She also considers voices of dissent that have emerged through satirical offerings like The Daily Show and science fiction series such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Takacs dissects how the War on Terror has been broadcast into our living rooms in programs that routinely offer simplistic answers to important questions—Who exactly are we fighting? Why do they hate us?—and she examines the climate of fear and paranoia they've created. Unlike cultural analyses that view the government's courting of Hollywood as a conspiracy to manipulate the masses, her book considers how economic and industry considerations complicate state-media relations throughout the era. Terrorism TV offers fresh insight into how American television directly and indirectly reinforced the Bush administration's security agenda and argues for the continued importance of the medium as a tool of collective identity formation. It is an essential guide to the televisual landscape of American consciousness in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Presents a look at "homegrown" Islamist terrorism, from 9/11 to the present, discusses the perpetrators who have acted both in the U.S. and abroad, and examines the controversial tactics used to track potential terrorists. --Publisher's description.

The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism systematically integrates the substantial body of scholarship on terrorism and counterterrorism before and after 9/11. In doing so, it introduces scholars and practitioners to state of the art approaches, methods, and issues in studying and teaching these vital phenomena. This Handbook goes further than most existing collections by giving structure and direction to the fast-growing but somewhat disjointed field of terrorism studies. The volume locates terrorism within the wider spectrum of political violence instead of engaging in the widespread tendency towards treating terrorism as an exceptional act. Moreover, the volume makes a case for studying terrorism within its socio-historical context. Finally, the volume addresses the critique that the study of terrorism suffers from lack of theory by reviewing and extending the theoretical insights contributed by several fields - including political science, political economy, history, sociology, anthropology, criminology, law, geography, and psychology. In doing so, the volume showcases the analytical advancements and reflects on the challenges that remain since the emergence of the field in the early 1970s.

Since the early twentieth century, technological transfers from the United States to Latin American countries have involved technologies of violence for social control. As the chapters in this book illustrate, these technological transfers have taken various forms, including the training of Latin American military personnel in surveillance and torture and the provision of political and logistic support for campaigns of state terror. The human cost for Latin America has been enormous—thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered, disappeared, or tortured, and whole communities have been terrorized into silence. Organized by region, the essays in this book address the topic of state-sponsored terrorism in a variety of ways. Most take the perspective that state-directed political violence is a modern development of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests weigh heavily. Others acknowledge that Latin American states enthusiastically received U.S. support for their campaigns of terror. A few see local culture and history as key factors in the implementation of state campaigns of political violence. Together, all the essays exemplify how technologies of terror have been transferred among various Latin American countries, with particular attention to the role that the United States, as a "strong" state, has played in such transfers.