Letters to the Editor

Abstract

To an old member of the Organization of American Historians your special issue on 9/11 (September 2002) is deeply troubling, but not I think for the reasons you anticipated, that is, preferring “history that refrains from commenting on current events or broadcasting its political passions” (p. 415). Your contributors to the special issue on 9/11 have chopped events and evidence from their rich context, and, with the help of some scholarly constructed amnesia, deposited them in the rubble left by the murderous events of 9/11. All so unnecessary if only you had held your contributors to your stated guidelines: In the end, we chose scholars with noted expertise on issues pertaining to terrorism, anti-Americanism, the Middle East, fundamental religious movements, and foreign relations, and we asked them for deliberative essays, scholarly pieces with deeper research and greater intellectual engagement than typically found in newspapers and magazines. (p. 413)