'Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.' That was John Brown on the evening of Sunday, 16 October 1859. He left the Kennedy farm with eighteen volunteers to start the second American revolution, intent on bringing America in line with its founding principles: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Carola Dietze asserts that Brown deserves to be seen as an emblematic figure in the history of terrorism, posing often uncomfortable questions about the nature of political violence. Dietze examines key cases of terrorist violence, such as the Harper's Ferry raid, to show that from its birth terrorism was twinned with modernity in Europe, Russia and the United States. It is not, as is often claimed, the product of Tsarist despotism or Islamic sects in medieval Persia. Combining a highly readable historical narrative with an analysis of larger issues in social and political history, The Invention of Terrorism is a lucid account of how the spread of knowledge about terrorist acts was, from the outset, a transatlantic process, one intended to impact rulers as well as the ruled. Using case studies from France, the United States, Germany and Russia, Dietze shows that terrorism has existed in its modern form since the 1850s, its core strategies and tactics remaining remarkably unchanged despite the advent of new technologies and methods. Book jacket.