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Turning points in historyWelcome to the first unit for Year 11 Modern History.

This unit aims to develop your understanding of the nature of historical inquiry.

We will use the “inquiry cycle” as the basis for this study and you will be assessed on the your ability to:

Plan and conduct an historical investigation on an historical turning point.

Analyse the background, activity, key personalities and events associated with your

chosen subject of investigation.

Present your findings in awritten portfolio using primary sources as evidence.

Present your findings to the class in an oral presentation

REQUIREMENTS:1. Written component: Approximately 1500 words with appropriate images/multimedia 2. Oral component: Approximately3 minutesEvaluation of your partner (if working in a group).

In your research, you should:• develop historical questions to direct your research• consult at least four different primary sources of information• Clearly explain the keyfeatures and issues• organise your writing and visuals into a logical sequence to answer the question you have researched,within the word limit allocated• use at least one visual aid to help illustrate the issues (Visual aids may include: maps, photographs,graphs, video clips, diagrams, timelines).• compile a bibliography of the references you have used

HISTORICALINVESTIGATIONYe

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Was 9/11 a turning point? Our first step in the practice investigation is to establish a series of questions that will help to guide our research.

Our overarching aim is to determine whether or not 9/11 was a turning point in history.

Read the following articles from the New York Times and answer the questions that follow each article.

An Infamy in HistoryBy DOMINIQUE MOISIPublished: September 7, 2011

PARIS — “What were you doing on 9/11?” In a few days this question will dominate all conversations, at least in the Western world. The emotional centrality of this tragic day remains undeniable, but what about its strategic centrality?

Is 9/11 an historical turning point, one that ushered us into the 21st

century just as the Sarajevo assassination in July 1914 marked our entrance into the 20th?

Contrary to what some analysts said in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, 9/11 did not signify the entrance into a world dominated by the “clash of civilizations” announced in the 1990s by Samuel Huntington.

With the benefit of hindsight, this unique human tragedy — nearly 3,000 people died in the Twin Towers of Manhattan — appears instead as the culminating point and the beginning of decline for Al Qaeda in its sectarian warfare against established Islam, as much as against the West.

Nor did 9/11 usher in, fortunately, a world dominated by “hyper-terrorism.” Terrorists inspired by Al Qaeda have continued to strike from Spain to Britain and from India to Nigeria, just to mention a few of their targets.

But placed on the defensive by the mobilization of the world against them — a collaborative effort that really made the difference — they have never been able to repeat 9/11.

The death of Osama bin Laden in the midst of the Arab Spring — a revolution that began without the knowledge or involvement of fundamentalist Islamists — declared the defeat of the

terrorists and the dawn of a post-Islamist world, even if Islamist parties do well in elections in countries like Egypt.

Of course terrorism can never be fully defeated. There will be more terror attacks. Al Qaeda may win a few more battles, but it has lost the war.

If 21st century historians will continue to regard 9/11 as a symbolic date, as a revealing accelerator of history, it will be less for the terror attacks themselves than for the American response.

Historians speak of the “law of unintended consequences.” The encounter between a few thousand confused voters in Florida in the

presidential elections in 2000 and a dozen terrorists indoctrinated by a nihilist ideology accelerated and may even have modified the course of history.

The encounter between George W. Bush and 9/11 produced consequences that even the terrorists, in their darkest dreams, could not foresee. It is unlikely that Al Gore as president would have used 9/11 as a pretext to launch the war in Iraq, a war that has resulted in the doubling of the American debt.

It would be highly exaggerated to say that Bin Laden became the equivalent for the United States of what Ronald Reagan was for a declining Soviet empire — the prime

mover of a ruinous and ill-considered rush forward (the armaments race for Moscow, and foreign adventures for Washington). And of course America today is not the equivalent of what the Soviet Union was yesterday — America’s internal contradictions have neither the depth nor the gravity of the Soviet Union’s.

Yet it is legitimate to ask whether the first decade of the 21st century has not been a “lost” one for the United States, and whether, in American eyes, the tree of fundamentalist terrorism did not hide the forest of the rise of Asia.

The purported American victory against fundamentalism has been a Pyrrhic one not only because of its financial, moral and diplomatic cost, but in its overreaction, in the waste of energy that could have been used far better in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

America probably underreacted to the terrorist threat before 9/11, and overreacted after the event.

So 9/11 is a historical moment, but not necessarily for the reasons that seemed to prevail at the time. It did not signal the arrival of a new world, but it has accelerated the end of the American Century.

Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI), and the author, most recently, of “Un Juif improbable.”

I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

QUESTIONS:

1. What does Masi mean by a “clash of civilizations”? Which civilisations is he referring to?

2. How many people died because of the 9/11 attacks?

3. What are the two targets that Al Qaeda has employed its “sectarian warfare” against?

4. How does “established Islam”

differ from the type of Islam that Al Qaeda promotes?

5. Which four country (other than the US) have been attacked by terrorists linked to Al Qaeda?

6. What is the “Arab Spring”? Who died in the midst of this movement?

7. What, according to this writer, was the “unintended consequence” of the war in Iraq?

8. What is a Pyrrhic victory?

9. What, according to the writer, has 9/11 accelerated?

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/

opinion/08iht-edmoisi08.html?_r=1

Was 9/11 a Historical Turning Point?By TED WIDMERPublished: September 16, 2011

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Dominique Moïsi argued on these pages on Sept. 8 (“An infamy in history” ) that the significance of 9/11 lies not in what many observers see as an opening salvo in a “clash of civilizations,” but rather in the fact that the attacks accelerated the end of the American Century. Ted Widmer, a historian who directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown

University, joins the debate.

It was irresistible, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, to draw large historical conclusions about the demise of the United States, and to express regrets over paths not taken. And so a mighty wind blew across the media landscape, lamenting “the lost decade,” as Dominique Moïsi called it in his column.

Moreover, Moïsi asked leading questions about the fall of empires, wondering if 9/11 was a historical disaster on the order of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Without quite answering in the affirmative, he still suggested that it

marked the beginning of the end of the American Century.

It is always tempting to search for historical comparisons — or in this case two (“the American Century” was coined as the United States was about to enter World War II). But 9/11 stands alone as an event, and we should resist the easy path to lump it together with the disasters of the past.

Few now deny that the Iraq war was a misguided effort that achieved few of its stated aims. That seemed to be nearly unanimous last week as commentators tried to focus on 9/11, but inevitably found their way into the series of military actions that

followed the destruction of the World Trade Center. And the end of the adventure in Afghanistan cannot come soon enough.

But Sarajevo? A lot of terrible things have happened in the last 10 years, but nothing on the scale of World War I. The Great War may have killed as many as 20 million people, destroyed three empires and permanently disrupted a power structure that had ruled much of the world for centuries. World War II may have killed 50 million and reshaped the world all over again. Most surveys indicate that 100,000 have been killed in Iraq, a small country in the Middle

East. That is not to minimize its consequences — Vietnam was a small country too, and Sarajevo a distant Balkan outpost. But still, it is not the same.

It is essential to be precise about the details. Playing fast and loose with the past can have disastrous consequences, and it was a similar imprecision that brought the Iraq war into our living rooms and our lives. For much of the last decade, we heard Osama bin Laden likened to Hitler or Stalin, when in fact there was nothing even remotely fascistic or totalitarian about the stateless band of terrorists he was trying to direct.

Most of those exuberant claims were made on the right, by partisans of the Iraq war nostalgic for World War II, but highly selective in their memory. In the neoconservative narrative, Winston Churchill was usually the dominant leader of the Allies, rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose politics were inconveniently progressive. Or for that matter, the other member of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin, whose politics went considerably past “progressive.” We didn’t hear Uncle Joe described very often in that context.

It has become rather easy to criticize President George W.

Bush for the mistakes he made, especially in Paris, where America’s failure to live up to French expectations is a much-cherished local tradition, nearly as old as the United States itself. But to fall into undisciplined thinking about the past risks perpetuating the same mistakes.

It also surrenders to a form of pessimism that is not especially instructive when the world seeks a new and better narrative.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have eroded both hard and soft power for the United States at a time when we could use both — along with the $1.2 trillion or so that we spent chasing after the specters of 9/11. But it

is hard to see how a refusal to fight those wars would have slowed China’s growth.

And it remains difficult to see how China will assume the great mantle of leadership that was thrust upon the United States for much of the last century. Or how that would bring much comfort to France.

Instead, commentators on the left and the right need to come up with creative solutions for guiding a world that does not always live up to its history.

QUESTIONS:

1. On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, what “large historical conclusions” have

historians drawn about the US?

2. What disaster did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 bring about?

3. Why does Ted Widmer believe that 9/11 is nothing like World War I?

4. What has the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “eroded”?

5. What is difference between “hard” and “soft” power?

6. How much as the “War on Terror” cost the US?

7. What does Widmer believe that commentators need to come up with?