As fears of domestic terror can close down airport gates and lead to mandatory bag checks at nearly every public event, an era of home grown bombings in the United States has been nearly forgotten.

In the early 1970s radical groups smuggled bombs into skyscrapers, targeted the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol and even targeted policemen. Journalist and author Bryan Burrough says that despite the hundreds of bombings conducted by these groups during the Nixon years, this era of domestic terrorism doesn’t take up most space in our cultural memory.

“Mainstream America doesn’t remember much about these groups because they don’t want to,” Burrough tells Steve Fast. “The Seventies and the late Sixties were kind of an ugly period for the country.”

In his book “Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” Burrough recounts the actions and motivations of groups including The Black Liberation Front, the Symbionese Liberation Army and others.

One of these ’70s groups, the Weather Underground, came to a new prominence in 2008 when a former member, University of Illinois at Chicago professor William Ayers, was singled out for a modern connection to then-candidate Barack Obama.

“At the beginning the Weather Underground essentially wanted to overthrow the government,”  Burrough says.

Ayers maintains that the means through which the “Weathermen” intended to effect political change were not violent.

“Bill and others have intentionally obscured what they set out to do,” Burrough says, pointing to an explosion that went off prematurely, without being set at an intended military target. “It was only after that accidental bombing that the group regrouped and said ‘look, we just can’t do this.'”

Listen to the interview: Bryan Burrough on The Steve Fast Show

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