Asynchronously mounted filesystems?

[Matt Alexander]

Does anyone know the history or have additional information on why Linux 
mounts filesystems asynchronously by default?  While giving your system a 
speed boost over synchronously mounted filesystems, it would also seem to have 
a lot of potential to cause filesystem damage if the system ever crashed.  Is 
there anything special about the ext2 filesystem that makes it immune to this 
problem?
Thanks,
~Matt