In 1963 and 1975 AJP Taylor published his illustrated histories of the First and Second World Wars. In the Illustrated History series, Taylor sought to convey the pace, scale, and contradictions of the World Wars, and to illustrate them with images, maps, and graphs that captured the horror, irony, and tragedy of global conflict. Our panel takes the first steps towards a multi-year effort to uncover historiographical approaches and key themes of an illustrated history of the ‘Global War on Terror.’

We seek to ‘illustrate’ the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in two senses of the word; first, we will attempt to locate and assess the most important graphic images of the era, and second, we will illustrate the war in the literary sense, and present research papers that examine specific social and political episodes of the GWOT. The term ‘Global War on Terror’ was widely panned at the time as imprecise and ideologically bankrupt, but it nevertheless captures the geographic scope and moral panic of the early 2000s, and provides a useful framing device. During this era, we see both the radical expansion and violent contestation of state power; within the many legal and military campaigns of GWOT, ideology served as a battleground for interpersonal status competitions on the shifting sands of globalization. Taylor assessed the First World War as an unmanageable conflict that mystified the political leaders ostensibly in control, but he understood the Second World War as a handful of warlords marshalling the terrifying strength of modernity. While the ‘GWOT’ had a financial and military center in the United States, a more interconnected geographic picture emerges than in either of the World Wars. Domestic flashpoints and key moments occurred along the brittle boundaries of India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Russia and China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the South Pacific, equatorial Africa, and more. The GWOT campaigns accompanied a crisis of competence in liberal hegemony, leaving room for the near collapse of global financial markets and inept reactions to man-made climate change.

The structure of our panel attempts to capture the scope of the effort. We begin with a lightning round that interprets key images and graphics from the GWOT and describes their archival origins. We then move on to more traditional papers, each of which combines imagery with illustrative episodes of the GWOT. Our speakers, while all trained in history, are each interdisciplinary, and are educators, former soldiers, legal scholars and more. The panel includes specialist presentations that examine and why United States ‘special forces’ soldiers adopted the iconography associated with indigenous Americans; why ‘story boards’ using Microsoft Power Point became the most important storytelling effort of U.S. military; why ‘the Surge’ in forces from Iraq in 2006 and 2008 represented an effort to sell the war to an increasingly skeptical American (and even global) audience; how American presidents marshalled 19^th century plenary powers to target 21st century ‘aliens’; and perhaps most importantly, how the violence and fear of the GWOT impacted young Muslim Americans.