What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300176551)

How our national identity has changed in significant and unexpected ways since the attacks of 9/11

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."

Author: Joseph Margulies
ISBN-10: 0300176554
ISBN-13: 9780300176551
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/21/2013
Pages: 392
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.52lbs
Size: 9.49h x 6.51w x 1.06d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/01/2013
New York Review of Books 11/07/2013 pg. 59
Choice 01/01/2014