The popular concept of terrorism in the earliest years of the 21st century is often confined to acts of suicide bombings or other attacks on civilians perpetrated by enraged religious or political fanatics in the Middle East or in other locales in which these attacks receive extraordinary media coverage. However, terrorism as a political phenomenon is much older and much more diverse than the lead stories on the nightly television news might indicate.

Anarchists demonstrate on May Day, 1887.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-69545).

[Page 467]The functional origins of terrorism have been lost to history, but it is known that terrorism was used to achieve either military or political ends as early as the Roman Empire. Terrorism by definition is the use of lethal martial ...