The bombings that changed the rules

A bomb is aimed at a place, but its reach is a whole society's sense of safety. The files here trace attacks that changed the ordinary texture of public life — the barriers around a federal building, the search of a bag at a concert, the screening of a package — each one bought at a terrible price.

The people killed were commuters, shoppers, worshippers, schoolchildren, and police officers. Four girls at a church in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning in 1963. A hundred and sixty-eight in Oklahoma City in 1995, nineteen of them children. Twenty-two leaving a concert in Manchester in 2017. Some cases were solved within days; Omagh, the deadliest single attack of the Northern Irish Troubles, still has not been.

Most of these are acts of political violence, one is a case of private rage, and their motives run from sectarian hatred to anti-war protest. The frame stays the same as everywhere in the archive: the loss first, and what a society built afterward to keep it from happening again.