A History of the Post-9/11 World

This website serves as a history of the post-9/11 world, and a resource for 9/11 cultural and political studies.

This website began as a course that I taught at the University of Warsaw in 2009, and lasted a few more years afterwards. When the US government assassinated Osama Bin Laden, I created a day by day account told through newspaper articles. The newspaper articles you can read in this website and that one are not current, but they are of historical value, and provide the context and contours of post-9/11 America.

The internet book on 9/11 is written by me, and is outdated. But, it does provide a detailed understanding of what America after 9/11 was like.

If you were born in the 1990s or 2000s, you may not understand what motivated the actions of the US government and the culture of its people. Put simply: the fear that 9/11 inspired motivated nearly everything thereafter. The wars, surveillance state policies, conspiracy theories, anti-Muslim policies and sentiments, and the moratorium on 9/11 humor, to name a few of the many political and cultural issues, are all 9/11 inspired.

One would have to live through that fear to deeply understand it. This website can provide a window into that fear.

If you want to understand the culture and politics of post-9/11 American society in the 2000s, the book remains an excellent and free online resource.

For more on politics, please visit politicalinequality.org.

20th Anniversary of Local Government Protests over the USA Patriot Act

It was 20 years ago that hundreds of local governments across the US protested the USA Patriot Act.

9/11 changed the US and the world. It created the USA Patriot Act. And it sparked hundreds of local governments to protest the Patriot Act.

In 2002, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (now Rights and Dissent) led the mass protest by providing data on local government protest and connecting governments on the language of the resolutions they passed that condemned the federal policy.

For a popular reading of the history of local government opposition to the USA Patriot Act, see: When Local Governments Protested the USA Patriot Act in politicalinequality.org.

For an academic article, consider reading:

Tomescu-Dubrow, Irina, Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski. 2014. “Ecological Determinants of Local Government Opposition to Federal Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 3: 401-419

Abstract: Public protest is usually conceived as challenge to the state, overlooking protest performed by governments within state structures. We identify local government opposition to federal policy decisions as a combination of contentious politics and policy innovation. This theoretical framework highlights the role of social structural conditions, political culture, and contextual pressures, which we examine using local government opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act as a case study. We employ multilevel mixed models on a merged data set constructed from (1) a list of places that opposed the Patriot Act, (2) the U.S. Census 2000, and (3) aggregated CBS News/New York Times national polls. We find that social and political variables at the community and at the state levels substantively impact the odds that local government entities express dissent to the Patriot Act. Results also show that prior instances of protest within a state carry significant weight for the process of remonstration.

1. It was 20 years ago that hundreds of local governments across the US protested the USA Patriot Act.
2. For a popular reading of the history of local government opposition to the USA Patriot Act, see: When Local Governments Protested the USA Patriot Act in politicalinequality.org.