"Why Historians Should Exercise Caution When Using the Word "Terrorism

Historians of the New Left will know of the three-year U.S. congressional hearings on "riots, civil and criminal disorders" that focused mostly on black liberation and campus antiwar groups. Toward the end of the hearings in 1970, the senators' rhetoric grew heated, constructing a vision of a vast leftist guerrilla war sweeping across the nation. The head of the investigation subcommittee, John McClellan, proclaimed: "Bombing, terrorism and sabotage are not subjects which have been historically and traditionally familiar to the American people." This astonishing moment of amnesia blacked out the record of white supremacist and anticommunist violence committed not only by the Ku Klux Klan but also by right-wing, antigovernment militias that had grown in the late 1950s. These militias trained for guerrilla war and supported paramilitary publishers such as Paladin Press that seeded the world with instructions on how to make improvised bombs and other explosives, publications still used today. Yet domestic "terrorism" in the United States is typically represented as being initiated by the disintegrating New Left, exemplified by the Weather Underground, whose members bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971. If for no other reason, a much fuller history of terrorism in the United States is needed, and Beverly Gage's state-of-the-field essay makes clear some of the most pressing questions.1

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• Looking beyond waves and datasets

  Open Access•Chris Millington•Critical Studies on Terrorism•2023

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