Teaching the JAH
The JAH editors select two articles each year to be featured in the Teaching. The Teaching the JAH project creates online “teaching packages” that demonstrate how new JAH articles might be used in teaching U.S. history. Each package includes a targeted article, brief comments from the article’s author, and a set of annotated documents intended for classroom use. Depending on the targeted articles, the document sets might include exercises, illustrations, photographs, video clips, audio clips, and excerpts from other primary historical texts. The packages also include links to other history-related web sites that hold additional relevant materials.
June 2011 Installment
Terrorism and the American Experience
Terrorism is often described as a twenty-first-century evil, a form of violence without context or precedent. But the questions that it poses and the responses that it has provoked in recent years are not altogether new. “Terrorism”—as a political tactic, a cultural concept, and a law enforcement issue—has an extensive history in the United States and around the world. This installment of Teaching the JAH introduces students to the historical study of terrorism in the United States. It asks them to think broadly about how to define terrorism and how to situate the history of political violence within the wide context of American history. The primary sources raise a range of questions: How did men and women who committed acts of terrorism explain and/or justify their actions within their own historical circumstances? How did other segments of American society understand and respond to their behavior? How did those particular understandings shape political and legal institutions in the United States? And what, if any, tradition of “terrorism” can be said to exist in—or against—the United States?
