Why learn about the challenges of the Twenty-First Century?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hopes that the new century would leave behind the conflicts of the previous one were dashed when two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. When the first plane struck the north tower, many assumed that the crash was a horrific accident. But then a second plane hit the south tower less than thirty minutes later. People on the street watched in horror, as some of those trapped in the burning buildings jumped to their deaths and the enormous towers collapsed into dust. In the photo above, the Statue of Liberty appears to look on helplessly, as thick plumes of smoke obscure the Lower Manhattan skyline.

The events set in motion by the September 11 attacks would raise fundamental questions about the United States’ role in the world, the extent to which privacy should be protected at the cost of security, the definition of exactly who is an American, and the cost of liberty. These questions persisted through the early twenty-first century. American politics shifted from Republican to Democratic, to even further Republican and Democratic again, with social issues combined with modern technology meaning that people engaged in American public life in new ways.

Figure 1. Supporters of defeated U.S. President Donald Trump cheer the breaching of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Twenty years after 9/11, the U.S. Capitol was stormed by thousands of right-wing protestors. Earlier on that morning, January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump hosted a rally for his supporters at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. During his speech, President Trump urged them to march on the Capitol and stop the certification of the November electoral vote. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said. “Fight like hell,” he said. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And so many did. They marched on the capitol, armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pepper spray, stun guns, and flag poles, and attacked the police officers barricading the building.

“It was like something from a medieval battle,” Capitol Police Officer Aquilino Gonell recalled. The mob pulled D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone into the crowd, beat him with flagpoles, and tasered him. “Kill him with his own gun,” Fanone remembered the mob shouting just before he lost consciousness. “I can still hear those words in my head today,” he testified six months later.

The mob breached the barriers and poured into the building, marking perhaps the greatest domestic assault on the American federal government since the Civil War. While the events of January 6 may have taken many by surprise, those events were nevertheless rooted in history.

Revolutionary technological change, unprecedented global flows of goods and people and capital, a decades-long War on Terror, accelerating inequality, growing diversity, a changing climate, political stalemate: our present is not an island of circumstance but a product of history. Time marches forever on. The last several decades of American history have culminated in the present, an era of innovation and advancement but also of stark partisan division, racial and ethnic tension, protests, gender divides, uneven economic growth, widening inequalities, military interventions, bouts of mass violence, and pervasive anxieties about the present and future of the United States. Through boom and bust, national tragedy, foreign wars, and the maturation of a new generation, a new chapter of American history is busy being written.