What changed when everything changed : 9/11 and the making of national identity

Resource Information

The work What changed when everything changed : 9/11 and the making of national identity represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of San Diego Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

What changed when everything changed : 9/11 and the making of national identity

Title remainder

9/11 and the making of national identity

Statement of responsibility

Joseph Margulies

Creator

• Margulies, Joseph

Subject

• Electronic books
• HISTORY -- United States -- 21st Century
• History
• Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
• National characteristics, American
• National characteristics, American
• Nationalism
• Nationalism -- United States
• 2000-2099
• September 11 Terrorist Attacks (2001)
• September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 -- Influence
• Terrorism -- United States -- Prevention | Social aspects
• United States
• United States -- History -- 21st century
• POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Security (National & International)

Genre

• History
• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

Beautifully written and carefully reasoned, this bold and provocative work upends the conventional wisdom about the American reaction to crisis. Margulies demonstrates that for key elements of the post-9/11 landscape--especially support for counterterror policies like torture and hostility to Islam--American identity is not only darker than it was before September 11, 2001, but substantially more repressive than it was immediately after the attacks. These repressive attitudes, Margulies shows us, have taken hold even as the terrorist threat has diminished significantly. Contrary to what is widely imagined, at the moment of greatest perceived threat, when the fear of another attack "hung over the country like a shroud," favorable attitudes toward Muslims and Islam were at record highs, and the suggestion that America should torture was denounced in the public square. Only much later did it become socially acceptable to favor "enhanced interrogation" and exhibit clear anti-Muslim prejudice. Margulies accounts for this unexpected turn and explains what it means to the nation's identity as it moves beyond 9/11. We express our values in the same language, but that language can hide profound differences and radical changes in what we actually believe."National identity," he writes, "is not fixed, it is made."

Cataloging source

N$T

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography