America's Culture of Terrorism

“Provide[s] needed historical context to Americans' current efforts to make sense of terrorism in the twenty-first century.” — American Historical Review

“America’s Culture of Terrorism is a tightly focused work of literary and cultural history.” — American Literature

“A complex and beautifully argued book.” — Australasian Journal of American Studies

“From the Haymarket Square explosion in 1886 to the almost-forgotten bombing of Wall Street in 1920, Jeffory Clymer reminds us of two critical aspects of American society in the era of industrial capitalism: first, that acts of terrorism have been committed on American soil ever since the invention of dynamite, and second, that Americans have somehow managed to forget this fact again and again. In this respect, nothing has changed since September 11, 2001 — except that Clymer’s argument has become still more urgent and more necessary. Charting the strange career of American terrorism through the nineteenth-century 'propagandists of the deed' through the works of Henry James, Jack London, Thomas Dixon, and poets of WWI, America’s Culture of Terrorism is an original, surprising, and enlightening book.” — Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University

“It’s high time that first-rate academic humanists enter the national debate over terrorism and anti-terrorism; it’s thus high time for Jeffory Clymer’s learned, inventive book.” — William J. Maxwell, author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars