Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Terrorism
The explosion at the Army Math Center blew in the window near my laboratory desk
On Monday, August 24, 1970, I was a graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. My research laboratory was in the chemistry building, and that morning I rode over on my bicycle to find broken glass everywhere.
A year after the September attacks, it has become clear that ours is a very old enemy.
For a sense of the continuity of the of the terrorist tradition in America, consider this actual sequence of events: The FBI smashes a dead-serious plot to overthrow the federal government and reveals that for more than a year the right-wing militias involved
Terrorists armed with high explosives have been busy on our shores lately. America has weathered such attacks before.
“Dynamite! of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. Stuff several pounds … into an inch pipe … in the immediate neighborhood of a lot of rich loafers … and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow.
American citizens held hostage by nationalist terrorists in a distant land. An aroused public calls for action. A cautious President seeks to avert violence. In 1901.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the United States was still a third-rate power, American diplomats, missionaries, and traders lived and worked abroad relatively free from the threat of revolutionary terrorism.
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