Terrorism and the American Experience:
A State of the Field
Beverly Gage
In 1970, just months before his death, the historian Richard Hofstadter called on U.S.
historians to engage the subject of violence. For a generation, he wrote, the profession had
ignored the issue, assuming that consensus rather than confl ict had shaped the American
past. By the late 1960s, with assassinations, riots, and violent crime at the forefront of
national anxieties, that assumption was no longer tenable. Everywhere, Americans seemed
to be thinking and talking about violence, except within the historical profession. Hofstadter
urged historians to remedy their “ inattention ” and construct a history of violence
that would speak to both the present and the past. 1
Over the last four decades, the historical profession has responded to that challenge. Studies
of racial confl ict, territorial massacres, gendered violence, empire, crime and punishment, and
war and memory make up some of the most esteemed books of the past generation. Yet on the
subject of “ terrorism, ” the form of violence that currently dominates American political discourse,
historians have had comparatively little to say. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001,
a handful of conferences have addressed historical aspects of terrorism, from its nineteenthcentury
origins to its impact on state building and national identity. Scholarly journals (including
the Journal of American History ) have devoted the occasional special issue to examining
terrorism’s roots and present-day implications. Within the historical profession, several booklength
works have taken up episodes of terrorism, examining the production of both violence
and state repression. Social scientists and journalists have off ered sweeping global histories,
tracing the problem of terrorism from antiquity to the present. 2
Beverly Gage is an associate professor of history at Yale University. She extends thanks to James Green, Alison...