Identify event 1, of your choice, occurring 2001-Present and explain what its roots are in the earlier periods of Western Civilization, what are the roots?
The terrorist attacks orchestrated by Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden on the United States in 2001 were rooted in Middle East conflicts stretching back since the creation of the state of Israel. “On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day” (Office of the Historian, 2018). Since this date a smoldering war between Israel and neighboring Arab nations has been in progress. The United States has supported Israel throughout the years with both aid and arms. This aid has been viewed by Muslim nations as unwarranted western interference in their affairs. Osama Bin Laden himself said the following in 2004:
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind. The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that.
Identify event 2, of your choice, occurring 2001-Present and explain what its roots are in the earlier periods of Western Civilization, what are the roots?
The Great Recession of 2008 caused a global financial crisis that emanated from U.S. financial institutions. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the early 1930’s, the U.S. government passed several pieces of legislation intended to regulate financial institutions in order to prevent future financial crises. According to Larkin (2018):
The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in direct response to the Great Depression and helped to stabilize and rebuild the nation’s economy. It expanded the regulatory powers of the Federal Reserve, prohibited banks from trading in corporate securities and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). (para.1)
The deregulation of United States financial institutions began in the 1980’s with the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (DIDMCA) followed by the Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act of 1982 (AMTPA). In 1994 the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) became law and then finally in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) effectively repealed part of Glass-Steagall, tearing down the walls between banking, insurance and investments (Larkin, 2018). These four laws allowed banks to operate in a manner that led the financial crisis of 2008.
Identify event 3, of your choice, occurring 2001-Present and explain what its roots are in the earlier periods of Western Civilization, what are the roots?
According to Encyclopedia Britannica (2018), “Hurricane Katrina was a tropical cyclone that struck the southeastern United States in late August 2005. The hurricane and its aftermath claimed more than 1,800 lives, and it ranked as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history” (para.1). Now there may be no historical root for the formation of the storm, but there are several historical events that increased the damage that was caused by Hurricane Katrina. For instance, the levies surrounding the city were in disrepair and originally built to only withstand a category three storm. According to an NBC news report (2005):
When the project was designed about 30 years ago, the corps believed it was protecting the city from an event that might occur only every 200 or 300 years. Two Corps of Engineers projects were in place to control flooding and prepare for hurricane damage in southern Louisiana. One was a flood control project with channel and pumping station improvements for Southeast Louisiana; the other was a project to protect residents between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River levee from surges driven by a fast-moving category 3 storm. Each year since 2001, the corps asked for much more money for those two projects than the Bush administration was willing to request, or Congress was willing to spend, according to figures compiled by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. (para.4)
