The present has a way of changing the manner in which historians think about the past. The trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, is likely to be no exception: Five years after the attacks on New York and Washington, many historians say Sept. 11 and its aftermath are leaving their mark on how US history is written and taught.
US history is now being studied less as the story of a neatly packaged nation state and more in a global context, as part of something much larger, many historians say. The idea of the US as an empire, too, is in vogue. And historians are giving new attention to topics like the turbulent history of civil liberties in the US.
There is growing interest in the history of terrorism, of Muslims in the US, of international cultural conflicts and exchanges.
The history of foreign policy is being rethought, some historians have said, with less emphasis on the Cold War and more on post-colonial politics.
The Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981 seem like significant turning points in ways that they had not before.
"For historians, history is never set in stone," said Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history and American studies at Yale who edited History and September 11th, a collection of essays.
"It's written and rewritten in each generation. The events of the present, of the contemporary age, always help us reframe the events of the past. And the events of the past always help us to reframe the age we're living in," she said.
Some of the shift has come in response to strong interest from students. In vivid detail, professors recalled classes they taught immediately after the attacks -- their students' hunger to understand, their sense of the attacks as a watershed in their lives, their sudden sense of vulnerability.
In the days and months that followed, historians said, they found themselves using history to shed light on a baffling present.
"For our students, it is quite clear that in everything -- from what it feels like in an airport, or dealing with Muslim neighbors in school or college or what they think about when they think about going abroad for junior year -- there is that sense that their Americanness is not safe from the rest of the world, or is deeply influenced by the United States' role and its relationships to the rest of the world," said Melani McAlister, an associate professor of US studies and international affairs at George Washington University.
Scholars disagree on the direction of the reframing of US history, sometimes along ideological lines.
While many historians say the attacks accelerated a push toward "internationalizing" US history -- looking at what Thomas Bender, a professor of history at New York University, called "a common history with common causes for central events in American history" -- others said Sept. 11 had renewed their interest in an almost opposite idea, that of US exceptionalism.
US exceptionalism, the view that the US is fundamentally different from other countries and has a special role in the world, fell out of favor around the time of the rise of the new social history in the late 1960s, said Stephan Thernstrom, a history professor at Harvard who describes himself as a neoconservative.
But since the attacks, he said, he has found himself increasingly drawn to the idea.
He compared his reaction to the current moment to the way "the massive conflict with fascism and then the Cold War focused attention on what is our civilization, why is it different from others. With that came a certain sense of heightened attachment to our civilization and a desire to defend it and protect it," he said.
Historians often find that contemporary events influence the study of history. Disillusionment with World War I inspired a revisionist interpretation of the US Civil War, that the war was unnecessary, said Bender and others.
That view was then challenged in the aftermath of World War II. The Reagan "revolution" brought new interest in the history of US conservatism; the women's movement helped make women's history a field of its own.
In the 1990s, globalization encouraged what is known as the internationalizing of US history, with a growing emphasis on comparative and transnational approaches.
"We've been a little backward in recognizing how important the outside world has been to our domestic life," said Joyce Appleby, a past president of the American Historical Association.
"It requires a change of consciousness. You're not just telling the story of American history and where it links up with another country; you see America in the world, affecting the world," she said.
That trend has accelerated since Sept. 11.
Jan Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University in Newark who is writing a book about US history between 1760 and 1830, said she has been working on several chapters about the French and Indian War and the origins of the revolution.
She found her attention drawn to the story of European soldiers sent to North America "to fight one episode of a huge international war."
"I realized that what I found particularly interesting was the conflict among British officials between those I would have called idealists and those who were realists. Certainly, similar issues come up with the Iraq war," she said.
Since late 2004, a great number of books on aspects of the US as an empire have been published. Amy Kaplan, a former president of the American Studies Association, said US imperialism has become a subject across the political spectrum.
"Are we an empire? If we are, in what sense?" said Michael Hunt, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describing the debate.
"Tangled with that empire question is the hegemony question: Do you understand empire only in formal terms of control or is it more global and systemic and maybe not territorial necessarily?" he said.
Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, said that her students demanded that their professors pay attention to the place of the US in the world.
Those students were suddenly interested in Islam. When McAlister started teaching in 1996, she said: "You kind of had to make an argument for why someone in an American history class would have to think about global issues."
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers