The Long History of Terrorism in New York City
Aftermath of the unsolved Wall St. bombing of 1920 (Library of Congress)
The history of terrorism in New York City did not begin on a warm and cloudless Tuesday morning in September 2001, or even on a cold February afternoon in 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing. What we know as terrorism — symbolic political violence — has been at the center of New York City life for generations.
In this two-part seminar, we’ll explore that long history and the often dramatic impact terrorism has had on Gotham. We’ll start during the Civil War, when a “vast and fiendish” Confederate plot to burn the city (and nearly a million New Yorkers within it) was foiled by a Union double agent. We continue through a tumultuous 20th century, where terrorism evolved alongside the growing metropolis, from the deadly reign of anarchist bombings at the start through the 1970s — when more acts of violence, in service of a wider variety of political causes, occurred in New York than at any other time and place in modern US history. Finally, we’ll come to the most recent, and most deadly, era of terrorism — our own era, from the 1993 bombing to 9/11 and beyond. Importantly, we’ll also explore why New York has been terrorism’s “Ground Zero” for practically all of modern history. These reasons are intrinsically linked to the uniqueness of the city, including but not limited to its nature as the media and finance capital of the western world, as the home to the United Nations, as a center of student activism, and as home to a concentration of immigrant and exile communities.
August 16th & 19th (Mon/Th), 6:30-8PM (ET)
$80 (2 sessions, 90 min. each)
Your guide in this journey will be David Viola, Adjunct Professor at the Center for Terrorism at John Jay College, CUNY. Dr. Viola, a documentary filmmaker and Navy Intelligence Officer who has deployed across the world with U.S. Special Operations Forces, has presented on terrorism in front of diverse audiences including the RAND Corporation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.