From Bacon's Rebellion to the Boston Bombings: How well do you know American extremism? A quiz.

AP/File
Some 168 people were killed and more than 500 others were injured in an explosion at a US federal government complex in Oklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995. US Army Veteran and security guard Timothy McVeigh was later convicted on 11 counts of murder and conspiracy relating to the blast.

American extremism takes many guises, from Islamist militants to right-wing militia members, and its roots precede the founding of the Republic. Take our quiz to see how familiar you are with the forces of unrest in American society that have led to foiled plots and periodic violence.

1. Since the 1980s, what has been the most common domestic terror target?

Internal Revenue Service offices

Abortion clinics

Universities

Military installations

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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