Although terrorism seems a relatively modern phenomenon, novelist and military historian Caleb Carr illustrates that it has been a constant of military history. In ancient times, warring armies raped and slaughtered civilians and gratuitously destroyed homes and cities; in the Middle Ages, evangelical Muslims and Christian crusaders spread their faiths by the sword; and in the early modern era, such celebrated kings as Louis XIV victimized noncombatants for political purposes.During the Civil War Americans first engaged in "Total war," the most egregious of the many euphemisms for the tactics of terror. The forces of the South tried to systematize this horrifying practice; but it fell to a Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, to achieve that dubious goal. Carr recounts Sherman's declaration of war on every man, woman, and child in the South -- a policy that brought long-term unrest tot...
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