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Thursday, December 17th, 2009 | Posted by Editor - Blog News Service

9/11 to climate change: Historians look back on the decade

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Y2K, the first year of a new century, arrived after much anticipation. Any decade is going to be full of the predictable and the unexpected — this one was no different. We talked to a few historians to make sense of what happened.

“The new century began on a bang, and it was a shot heard ’round the world,” Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a history professor at San Diego State University, said, speaking of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“People are going to think that 9/11 is a significant historical turning point no matter what happens, because it certainly altered the international order,” said Bruce Schulman, who teaches history at Boston University.

Brian Balogh, a history professor at the University of Virginia, pointed out that 9/11 demonstrated the power of non-state actors and has kept us talking about “homeland security,” a term not widely used before the attacks. Hoffman said 9/11 revealed that the U.S. didn’t have a post-Cold War strategic vision.

But before the attacks, there was the unforgettable presidential election of 2000, a close race followed by a recount and momentous Supreme Court decision. And while the full historical significance of these major events and their aftermaths may largely remain to be seen, both reflect a growing trend in the century’s first decade: heightened political partisanship.

As a result of 9/11, the political polarization was amplified, said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and author of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism.”

Balogh added that the 2000 election contributed to political partisanship because the close race caused each side to use “any weapon in their arsenal.” Nowadays there are fewer political moderates and fewer legislative compromises — a trend exemplified in the current debate over health care reform. Bills emerged from Congress with the support of just one Republican. In the 1960s, Balogh noted, Democrats got more GOP support to pass landmark civil-rights legislation.

Zelizer said he thinks evolving media technology — and the development of the 24/7 news cycle, thanks in part to the rise of Internet blogging and social-networking sites — has helped increase partisan bickering this decade.

And now our daily lives can feel incomplete without technological developments we either didn’t have or didn’t tap into in great numbers in 1999, such as smart phones and iPods.

“The most dramatic change [of the decade] is, in essence, expecting to have all the information in the world at our fingertips and to be constantly in touch with people whenever we want to be, however we want to be,” said Balogh, who also cohosts a radio show called “BackStory with the American History Guys.” “We’re increasingly connected by what we buy, by what we read, by lifestyles. I think we’re less connected by geography and by our allegiances and attachments to nations.”

A very important landmark this decade was, of course, the election of President Barack Obama on Nov. 4, 2008.

“If in 2004 you told me that in the next election we would elect a black president, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy. That’s not happening maybe for my lifetime,’” Schulman said. “Now…could you imagine that ever again, at least ever again at least in the next 16 or 20 years, we would have two tickets that would be all white males? I don’t think we’ll ever see that again.”

What we will see is the continuation of the demographic shifts that have been evolving in the U.S. for years — shifts that produced a few significant developments this decade.

Schulman noted that the 2010 Census may show a record number of foreign-born inhabitants. A 2008 estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Hispanics and Latinos made up 15.4 percent of the population, becoming the country’s largest minority group.

“Diversity is leading to a different America,” said Daryl Michael Scott, a history professor at Howard University. “African-Americans have been the largest minority in the country since its founding, and I think it takes place within the 2000s, this formal passing of the guard.”

Another shift we’ve seen recently is in our attitude on global warming and climate change, Balogh and Hoffman said.

“It’s something that’s really solidified in the past decade,” noted Hoffman, who’s also the author of “In the Lion’s Den: A Novel of the Civil War.” “All kinds of people who were either eager to believe or eager to disbelieve all came to stand at the same spot to realize this is something we have to take seriously.”

For example, in 2007, former Vice President Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change and won an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Currently, Obama’s plan for climate talks in Copenhagen is “the first time in more than a decade” that the U.S. has offered a promise to reduce climate-altering gases, The New York Times reported.

Our attention to climate change is a trend that’s likely to continue in 2010 and beyond, Balogh said, noting that our reaction to climate change will have a big impact on our quality of life.

So what else can we take from this decade? Hoffman sums it up by saying it’s been a decade largely of ambiguity and anxiety — leaving us much room for improvement come 2010.

“It’s a decade of fear in some ways,” she said. “It’s a troubled time. Things like the election of Obama make it hopeful, but it’s also troubled.”

- Laura E. Davis

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