A History of Violence and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

I do not have a medal or garlands for Beverly Gage, but I can pay her my thanks. In “Terrorism and the American Experience,” Gage does admirably well something extremely important and difficult. She provides “an overview of the burgeoning historiography on terrorism,” while articulating “how we might integrate such work into narratives of the American past and present.”1 The importance of the task is clear. Long at the margins of American concern, “terrorism” has moved since September 11, 2001, to the center of the American political universe. Transforming such diverse realms as security doctrine and the law, it aches for historical perspective. The difficulties are legion, as Gage ably documents. Shot through with subjectivity and rank moralism, the construct “terrorism” is notoriously hard to define. The provenance of politicians, security experts, journalists, and scholars, talk of terrorism is as sprawling as it is polemical. And, however urgent today, the study of terrorism has historically been shunned by historians of America, for whom the tacit assumptions of American exceptionalism have generally rendered terrorism something exotic and aberrant in the nation's experience. Gage's essay itself has a polemical quality as it tries both to unsettle that comforting faith and orient future research toward an appreciation of the violence suffusing the American past. The result, surely to the chagrin of self-appointed guardians of America's historical virtue such as Lynne Cheney, is a renewed call for historians of America to do what they have done so well for so many years: focus on inequality, injustice, and social conflict as integral parts of the American narrative

American exceptionalism · Epistemology · Exceptionalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Terrorism · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society