Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

When the German national parliament, the Bundestag, held a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2015, the historian Heinrich August Winkler was asked to deliver the main address. In his speech, Winkler confirmed the central role of National Socialism and the Holocaust for German national identity. Germany’s responsibility for genocide and war meant, seventy years after the events, a special responsibility toward Israel, and for the states of east-central and eastern Europe, which had suffered most terribly under German occupation, and for the European Union project as a project of peace and reconciliation in a continent where German hypernationalism had brought destruction on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

Russia was an integral part of the modern world’s first historical wave of terrorism, which lasted from the final third of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Some historians and terrorism experts even consider the Russian Empire to be the ‘birthplace’ of terrorism. Indeed, in Russia, terrorism as a systematic tactic of revolutionary strategy, with its own ideological justification and organisational framework, took shape in 1869–81, is usually dated back to Sergei Nechayev’s ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ and was developed and applied in practice by the Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’) organisation. By the start of the twentieth century, terrorist bombings in British India, the Balkans and elsewhere were often referred to as ‘the Russian way’, or ‘the Russian method’. Along with anarchist terrorism in Europe, which started to spread roughly at the same time, and the early resort to terrorist means by some national liberation and anti-colonial movements, Russian revolutionary terrorism of the late nineteenth century was certainly one of the first identifiable forms and clear manifestations of modern terrorism. Placing the Russian case in a global historical context allows us to assess the extent to which its national experience forms, conforms to or deviates from global trends in terrorism.

For a long time, studies on terrorism as a historical phenomenon have neglected gender as an analytical category. In political science, and especially Gender Studies or gendered Security Studies, however, gender has become an issue since 9/11 and the growing participation of Muslim women in terrorist attacks. These studies, however, mostly interpret terrorism as a phenomenon which emerged first in the twentieth century and, if they work historically, they compare case studies dealing with post-Second World War phenomena with recent examples of political non-state violence. The important varieties of nineteenth-century terrorism are frequently neglected. Moreover, these authors use terms with a centuries-old gendered tradition, for example ‘hero’ or ‘martyr’, without reflecting the historically rooted gendered implications of these terms and without taking account of the gendered traditions of the representation of male or female political violence which go back more than two hundred years. This paper wants to address this lack of historical contextualisation. In a gendered historical perspective we ask: what role has gender played in the development of modern terrorism during the nineteenth century? What are the gendered stereotypes concerning political violence which have been constructed and transmitted since the early nineteenth century? And in what way do these stereotypes influence recent interpretations of terrorism and historical research on terrorism?

Terrorism and responses to terrorism have repeatedly had a profound influence in shaping human experience. The mutually shaping intimacy of non-state and state violence, together with the often agonising legacies emerging from that terrorising relationship, continue to determine the contours of many people’s experience (in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Spain, the UK, Colombia and across so much of the polarised world). Given this importance within the human past, what can we say about history and the study of terrorism? In introducing the present volume, this chapter asks five central questions. First, what has been the relative contribution of historians to the existing study of terrorism? Second, what are the distinctive insights potentially brought by historians to our understanding of the subject? Third, what are the particular challenges for historians as they engage with the study of terrorism? Fourth, what are the opportunities for historians in studying this phenomenon? Fifth, given these aspects of the relationship between history and terrorism (the contribution to date, the distinctive insights, the challenges, the opportunities), what will this book decisively and originally offer?

In several respects, history is at the forefront of terrorism scholarship through challenging the domination of the social sciences and conventional wisdoms of the present that do not hold up to scrutiny once historicised. Moreover, historical research frequently accomplishes this by accessing a rich supply of primary source material that is more readily available than contemporary records because the passage of time has rendered it less sensitive. Despite these factors, there remains a broader impression, especially among governments, that terrorism’s past has little relevance to its present, hence the placing of resources into contemporary social science research instead of into the historicising of terrorism. As with terrorism, counterterrorism is not solely a phenomenon of the present day. It has a history as long as that of terrorism. Whether it is in the form of counterterrorism methods, such as the reliance on human intelligence, the difficulty in striking a balance between civil liberties, human rights and security or how to define the threat needing to be countered, the issues of the twenty-first century are, to varying extents, re-emergent, not nascent. As scholars make increasing inroads into excavating the difficult and convoluted history of terrorism, the need to exhume another inherent element of the complex equation, counterterrorism responses in both the micro and macro, grows ever greater.

This book has involved scholars thinking historically about terrorism. In relation to the four main areas of understanding in the field – definition, causation, consequences and appropriate response - what can we therefore say that we know, and what should we prioritise next in our research? This chapter will identify some of what the contributors themselves have valuably argued, and it will consequently have a historical dimension. But it will also relate such ideas to wider understandings, findings and agendas, recognising that the study of terrorism is and should be collaborative between disciplines.

Terrorism is a complicated phenomenon with a long and complex history. Analytically it is a difficult issue to grasp, dissect and analyse, to evaluate and respond to. As a consequence of this complexity, different academic disciplines ask different questions on terrorism. Historians could be seen as the generalists in the field of Terrorism Studies. Motivated by many questions that are also asked in other disciplines, they are intrigued by the complexities that define terrorism, its long-term patterns, changes and continuities, but also by very detailed case studies of individual incidents, groups, responses and characters. It will be the purpose of this chapter to look at what history can offer for the study of terrorism, how interdisciplinarity can be fruitful, what new themes and approaches can be developed by venturing beyond traditional division lines of established disciplines, and finally, to assess the limitations of multidisciplinarity in terrorism research. Thereby, hopefully, this text will encourage further academic cross-fertilisation to advance all our understanding of the puzzle that is terrorism.

The ‘ziggy shape’ comes from Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘History’, which is explored throughout the chapter. It engages with Penelope Corfield’s Time and the Shape of History. It sets out the troubles that historians have had in writing about law experience in the past. Using Laurence Sterne’s account of writing history in Tristram Shandy, Chapter 2 explores the narrative shape of history and of the law. The chapter also explores Sterne’s own experience of the law in eighteenth-century Yorkshire.