terrorism

Martha Hodes Talks "My Hijacking" with HNN

by Michan Connor

In 1970, when she was 12, Martha Hodes was held hostage for nearly a week in a campaign of airline hijacking that captured world attention. She discusses trauma and erasure in the historical record, the roles of remembering and forgetting in shaping views of the past, and how she investigated herself as a historial actor. 

Martha Hodes Turns Historian's Training to Reach Memory Hidden by Trauma

A memoirist of her own experience of terrorist hostage-taking reviews Martha Hodes's effort to apply the tools of historians to recover memory of being held in the Jordanian desert on a hijacked plane in 1970. 

Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking

At age 12, the historian, with her older sister, was a passenger on a jet hijacked by Palestinian militants. After decades of minimizing the story, her efforts to approach her past as a historian highlight the gaps in documentary records, the contradictory ways memory can fill those gaps, and the varying degrees of distance historians keep from their subjects.

German Government Panel of Historians Begins Inquiry into 1972 Munich Olympics Killings

The government hopes to address ongoing questions raised by the families of murdered Israeli athletes about failures of security before the attack and as the crisis unfolded. 

Biden Should Remove Cuba from List of State Sponsors of Terrorism

by Guillaume Long

After Obama removed Cuba from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, Trump reinstalled it for petty political reasons. The Biden administration should reverse the decision again. 

Black History, White Terror, and Rosewood at 100

by Dan Royles

The efforts of historians and survivors to achieve a small measure of justice and acknowledgment for the Rosewood massacre demonstrate the stakes of Florida's current efforts to restrict the teaching of history that challenges white supremacy. 

"As if I Wasn't There": Writing from a Child's Memory

by Martha Hodes

Writing her own memory of being held hostage by terrorists forced the author to put herself at the center of the story. 

The Battle over Reproductive Freedom Still Rages at Dr. George Tiller's Former Clinic

"It’s been more than a decade since Tiller was murdered, but at Trust Women, which reopened and rebranded under his protégé Julie Burkhart in 2013, the past has a habit of lingering outside the gates."

African American Policy Forum Statement on Buffalo Massacre

"Racial terrorism would die out with the generations weaned on it—or so the more hopeful among us believed."

Isaac Chotiner Interviews Kathleen Belew on White Power and the Buffalo Mass Shooting

"The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation."

Does Israel's Right Cultivate a Permanent Enemy to Justify a Permanent Occupation?

by Alon Ben-Meir

The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians have been born since the occupation began. The current Israeli government seems content to exploit violent outbreaks like those of recent weeks to ensure that no one seriously imagines alternatives.

Is the British Legal System Finally Ready for Justice for the True Perpetrators of an IRA Bombing?

Journalist Chris Mullin discusses the saga of wrongful conviction, eventual exoneration, and delayed justice for the victims of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, and argues he is being scapegoated for the whole mess because he won't identify a source who was involved.

FBI Identifies 6 Juvenile Persons of Interest in HBCU Bomb Threats

On the first day of Black History Month multiple historically Black campuses reported bomb threats. 

The Historian's Approach to Understanding Terrorism (and Why it's Needed)

by Richard English

Historians have the long-term focus, the attention to particularity and contingency, and the willingness to engage with sources from multiple origins that are missing from policy approaches to terrorism. 

9/11's Memorials and the Politics of Historical Memory

by Marita Sturken

Major 9/11 memorials try to fix the public memory on a moment of national unity that, 20 years later, seems illusory. Other memorials point the way to using the force of memory to encourage critical reflection on nationalism.

Were the 9/11 Attacks Preventable?

by J. Samuel Walker

It's impossible to know if more diligent preparation for potential Al Qaeda attacks could have prevented them, but the Bush administration's slowness to develop a national security strategy for terrorism will always haunt the nation and the world. 

Perspective on the History of the Taliban

Wazmah Osman of Temple University discusses how the weekend's events, when the fall of Kabul seemed imminent, and explains why the Taliban's defeat was illusory.

Twenty Years after 9/11, its Memorialization Remains Contested

by John Bodnar

"How people respond to traumatic events and the pain of others, of course, is always unpredictable. But such responses have consequences."

France Arrests Ex-Members of Italy Extremist group Red Brigades

Alleged members of the leftist terror group had been harbored in France under policies of its former Socialist president François Mitterand, with the proviso that such sanctuary was only for those who had not been involved in violence. 

White Terrorism: From Post-Civil-War Lynchings to the Present

by Walter G. Moss

The Capitol riots of January 6 echoed elements of mob lynchings in the participants' binary us/them view of society, a conservative white Protestant religious culture, and a willingness to accept rumor and conspiracy as justifications for their actions.