Describe the September 11 attacks and their consequences, trace major early-2000s events even-handedly, and synthesize the course's throughlines in a capstone historical argument.
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into New York's World Trade Center towers (both of which collapsed), one into the Pentagon, and one into a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back against the hijackers; nearly 3,000 people were killed, the deadliest attack on American soil in the nation's history. The U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan weeks later to remove the Taliban government that had harbored al-Qaeda, and Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, expanding government surveillance and law-enforcement powers -- a genuinely contested trade-off between security and civil liberties that Americans continued debating for years afterward, echoing the Espionage Act debate from Unit 2 and the McCarthy-era debate from Unit 6. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq based partly on intelligence claiming Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; no such weapons were ultimately found, and the decision and its long, costly aftermath remain genuinely debated by historians and the public alike, a contested judgment call this course leaves open rather than resolves.
The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by a collapsing housing market and risky mortgage lending, produced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, prompting a large government financial-system bailout and a deep recession; that same year, Barack Obama's election as the first African American president marked a historic milestone many Americans connected directly back to the long arc of the Civil Rights Movement studied earlier this year. In the years since, the rise of smartphones and social media has reshaped how Americans get news and form political opinions, coinciding with rising political polarization that researchers have documented and that this course simply describes as a real, measurable trend rather than assigning blame to any party or position. The COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in 2020, became the deadliest public health crisis in a century, with enormous social and economic effects still being studied today. A historian studying events this recent faces a real limitation the rest of this course has not: the passage of time that reveals a fuller picture, and archives and hindsight that let earlier chapters be judged with more confidence -- which is exactly why this final week asks you to practice building a careful, evidence-based historical argument, rather than a final verdict, about the era you are living through yourself.
Mastery looks like: They can describe September 11's events and consequences, explain why the Iraq War remains genuinely contested, and construct a multi-example throughline argument spanning at least three different units of the course.
Common stumbles: Treating recent, still-unfolding events with the same false certainty as well-settled distant history, instead of recognizing that historical distance changes how confidently any era can be judged.