Ten Years After 9.11: How Has the United States Changed? ‘At times of crisis, the most patriotic act of all is the unyielding defense of civil liberties and the right to dissent,’ wrote celebrated historian Eric Foner days after the 9/11 attacks. As national security became an obsession in Washington and the mainstream media enlisted in the Bush administration's war, the need for an independent, critical press seemed more urgent than ever. The enduring concerns of The Nation took on a new relevance. Ten years later, the events of 9/11 continue to reverberate, with the killing of Osama bin Laden and the Obama administration's ongoing pursuit of the Bush-era national security agenda. In this context, leading Nation writers and thinkers engage in a conversation about what has changed in the United States since September 11, 2001. Key questions to be discussed include: Are we more secure? How can we as a country strike the right balance between security and liberty? How has the marketing of fear reshaped our politics, society, and culture? How should we rethink the concept of the War on Terror? How can we end the war in Afghanistan and devise a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict? How can we dismantle a security apparatus that too often invokes state secrecy? Do U.S. history—and other countries' histories—offer useful guideposts? If we accept, as The Nation has argued, that the most effective way to halt global terrorism involves cooperation with the global community, what frameworks do we envision and how can they be developed? What can we, as a nation, do to prevent another 9/11?"
Bio
Eric Foner
Eric Foner is an Americanhistorian. On the faculty of the Department of History at Columbia University since 1982, he writes extensively on political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, Reconstruction, and historiography.
Foner is the leading contemporary historian of the post-Civil WarReconstruction period, having written Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, winner of many prizes for history writing, and more than ten other books on the topic. In 2011, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Foner's most recent book, was selected as the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Foner also won the Bancroft in 1989 for his book Reconstruction.
In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association.
Melissa Harris-Perry
Melissa Harris-Perry is an MSNBC host, a columnist for The Nation, and a professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Her books include "Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America" and "Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought."
Photo Credit: Heidi Gutman
Christopher Hayes
Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation and host of Up w/ Chris Hayes on MSNBC (Sat 7-9am and Sun 8-10am.) From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. From 2008-2010, he was a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times.
Since 2002, he's written about political culture and political economy. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic,The Washington Monthly,The Guardian, and The Chicago Reader.
His book about the crisis of authority in American life, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, will be published by Crown in June 2012.
Chris grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Brown University in 2001 with a BA in Philosophy and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Kate.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Katrina vanden Heuvel has been The Nation's editor since 1995 and its publisher since 2005.
She is the co-editor of Taking Back America—And Taking Down the Radical Right (Nation Books, 2004) and editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms (NationBooks, 2005).
She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers(Norton, 1989) and editor of The Nation: 1865-199, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.
A weekly columnist for WashingtonPost.com, she is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on MSNBC, CNN, ABC and PBS and public radio. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times,the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Her blog for thenation.com is "Editor's Cut."
John Nichols
John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
Nichols writes about politics for The Nationmagazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in theNew York Times,Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.
Nichols is the author of The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press); a critically acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press); and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press).
With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories), Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press) and, most recently, The Death and Life of American Journalism(Nation Books). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.