I am an emeritus professor of Russian and modern European history with twenty-five years of teaching and research experience, and I’ve been teaching the history of terrorism for almost that long. I am drawn to the field because it gives me a prism through which to explore nearly every topic in modern history that I’m passionate about: violence, extremism, the growth of the state, the proliferation of modern ideologies, and so on. In fact, I could teach most of my courses, including the survey of European history, almost entirely through the lens of terrorism, which is a sobering thought!
I have taught the history of terrorism for over twenty years, and I think this is the single best introduction to terrorism available. When people ask me for one book to read on the subject, this is my obvious choice.
Hoffman is one of the most respected scholars of terrorism. In this book he includes a brief survey of the history of terrorism as a springboard to examining how it manifests in the world today. The writing is accessible, and the takeaways are clear.
Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism has remained the seminal work for understanding the historical evolution of terrorism and the terrorist mind-set. In this revised third edition of his classic text, Hoffman analyzes the latest developments in global terrorism, offering insight into new adversaries, motivations, strategies, and tactics. He focuses on the rise of ISIS and the resilience of al-Qaeda; terrorist exploitation of the Internet and embrace of social media; radicalization of foreign fighters; and potential future trends, including the repercussions of a post-caliphate ISIS. Hoffman examines the demographics of contemporary terrorist leaders and recruits; the continued use of suicide bombers; and…
This is the one book on the history of terrorism that I wish I had written. Zamoyski spins out a great tale, one that reads like a spy thriller. It’s the story of how early 19th-century European politicians and statesmen overreacted to small, marginalized, underground revolutionary movements, turning them into existential threats to the civilized order.
In doing so, men like Austrian leader Klemens von Metternich created both our modern understanding of the terrorist boogeyman and the mechanisms and justification of the modern police state. Zamoyski is a great writer, and I eagerly followed him down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. I hesitate to say it, given the subject matter of the book, but this is one fun read.
For the ruling and propertied classes of the late eighteenth century, the years following the French Revolution were characterized by intense anxiety. Monarchs and their courtiers lived in constant fear of rebellion, convinced that their power--and their heads--were at risk. Driven by paranoia, they chose to fight back against every threat and insurgency, whether real or merely perceived, repressing their populaces through surveillance networks and violent, secretive police action. Europe, and the world, had entered a new era. In Phantom Terror, award-winning historian Adam Zamoyski argues that the stringent measures designed to prevent unrest had disastrous and far-reaching consequences, inciting…
I think Fellman’s book is hands down the best work on the history of terrorism in the United States, even though he only covers the period from John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry to the American suppression of the Philippine Insurgency in 1899-1902.
The book is scrupulously sourced like an academic work, but the writing is clear, fluid, and utterly compelling. I found myself putting the book down every few pages to ruminate on the illuminating connections Fellman draws between past and present.
This book allowed me to see all too clearly the ways in which terrorism is not something experienced just “over there,” but rather something baked intrinsically into the American experience.
With insight and originality, Michael Fellman argues that terrorism, in various forms, has been a constant and driving force in American history. In part, this is due to the nature of American republicanism and Protestant Christianity, which he believes contain a core of moral absolutism and self-righteousness that perpetrators of terrorism use to justify their actions. Fellman also argues that there is an intrinsic relationship between terrorist acts by non-state groups and responses on the part of the state; unlike many observers, he believes that both the action and the reaction constitute terrorism. Fellman's compelling narrative focuses on five key…
I return over and over to Zulaika and Douglass’ book as the most important and valuable text in the field that has come to be called critical terrorism studies. They ask a simple question: How can terrorism, something that kills relatively so few Americans–less in a typical year than are killed by lightning or choke to death on dinner–come to be seen as a fundamental threat to the very foundation of our life?
They weave an answer out of history, media studies, and sociology that is jargon-free enough to be accessible to an educated reader but sophisticated enough to get you rethinking everything you thought you knew about terrorism. That’s what it did for me.
Terror and Taboo is about the mythology of terrorism; it is an exploration of the ways we talk about terrorism. It offers incontestable evidence to support the idea that we give power to terrorism by the way we write and talk about it. According to Zulaika and Douglass, we make terrorism worse by the way we represent it in the media and in everyday conversation. Through their examination of terrorism, they propose to remove the taboos surrounding terrorism. Terror and Taboo is full of examples to ground the authors premise, ranging from specific examples, such as tendency to talk more…
Even though it was written in 2007, Wright’s book on the 9/11 terror attacks and their back story remains the single best work on the subject. Wright combines big-picture historical analysis with a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s flair for psychology and storytelling.
I have read nothing since that draws together as well all the myriad strains of this complex and earth-shattering story. This is the book I go back to to help me think about the single most important event so far of the 21st century.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11” (The New York Times Book Review), this definitive history explains in gripping detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
In gripping narrative that spans five decades, Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist…
My book tells the story of terrorism, from its origins in the ancient and medieval world to its emergence as a signature strategy of the modern age, beginning with the French Revolution. It makes sense of terrorism within its broad political, religious, and social contexts and explains how those who have used it have adapted to revolutions in technology, communications, and political ideologies.
The book includes extensive coverage of Russian revolutionary violence, anarchist terrorism in the United States and Europe, white supremacist terror in the US, state terror during the first half of the 20th century, terror campaigns in the Middle East, Algeria, and Northern Ireland, the rise of jihadist and other religious terrorisms, and the recent spread of far-right terror.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
