Terrorist Attacks on American Soil

From the Civil War Era to the Present

By (author) J. Michael Martinez

Publication date:

28 December 2017

Length of book:

488 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

219x148mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780810896208

Understanding the context of terrorism requires a trek through history, in this case the history of terrorist activity in the United States since the Civil War. Because the topic is large and complex, Terrorists Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War to the Present does not claim to be an exhaustive history of terrorism or the definitive account of how and why terrorists do what they do. Instead, this book takes a representative sampling of the most horrific terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in an effort to understand the context in which they occurred and the lessons that can be learned from these events.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Understanding Terrorism
PART I: The Nineteenth Century
Chapter 1: “A Sight Which Can Never Be Forgotten”: The Mountain
Meadows Massacre (1857)
Chapter 2: “The Gentle, Kindhearted Bioterrorist”: Luke Pryor Blackburn and the
Yellow Fever Plot (1864-1865)
Chapter 3: “We May Suspect That Race was the Cause of the Hostility”: The
Colfax Massacre (1873)
PART II: The Modern Era
Chapter 4: “The McNamaras Have Betrayed Labor”: The Los Angeles Times
Bombing (1910)
Chapter 5: “An Explosion Just Like the Sound of a Gatling Gun”: The Wall Street
Bombing (1920)
Chapter 6: “A President Has to Expect These Things”: The Truman Assassination
Attempt (1950)
Chapter 7: “The Klan is Back on the Market”: The Sixteenth Street Bombing and the
Civil Rights Movement (1963)
Chapter 8: “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Winds Blows”:
Weatherman and the Counterculture Movement (1960s)
PART III: Postmodern Terror
Chapter 9: “A Revolution Against the Industrial System”: The Unabomber
(1970s-1990s)
Chapter 10: “How Charged with Punishments the Scroll”: The Oklahoma City
Bombing (1995)
Chapter 11: “There is a Bomb in Centennial Park; You Have 30 Minutes”:
Eric Robert Rudolph (Late 1990s)
Chapter 12: “The System was Blinking Red”: The Radical Islamic Movement and the September 11 Attacks
PART IV: Conclusion
The Lessons of Terrorism
Notes
References
About the Author

The United States has suffered a number of violent attacks on its own soil. Martinez (Coming for To Carry Me Home) surveys 12 of them: three in the 19th century (e.g., the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre); five in the 'Modern Era' (e.g., the Ku Klux Klan’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963); and four examples of 'Postmodern Terror' (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11). He examines each attack to determine whether it qualifies as a 'terrorist act.' . . . He covers the social circumstances surrounding each attack in order to describe the motivations and origins of the perpetrators. In the cases of individual actors such as Ted Kazinsky, the Unibomber, this is effective. . . . Martinez’s conclusion . . . is that throughout history disaffected people have resorted to terrorism to spread or emphasize their causes.