Teaching 9/11 in 2026

 Yesterday, I took public transit to Kennesaw to deliver my annual 9/11 lecture to Dr. Jennifer Dickey's public history students. Three students were babies on 9/11/01.  The rest had not yet been born. It was a small class, but interested and engaged. Almost half of the students had actually visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City. This was a new high percentage for one of my lectures. Thus, the students were especially lively when the discussion turned to the role that a 9/11 museum ought to play in public life.

One student vehemently argued that the museum was not serving the public appropriately because it failed to provide analysis of what led to 9/11 and its impact on the first quarter of the 21st century. His passion as he talked about his uncle's military service in Afghanistan reminded me of my frustration with the lack of curriculum on the Vietnam War (or really the Cold War at all) during my high school years that culminated with the year of the 9/11 attacks. The Vietnam War had concluded in 1975, 26 years before my senior year of high school. In fact, the social studies teacher responsible for U.S. history classes had graduated from high school the year that war had ended, just narrowly missing the draft. I remember asking him why our curriculum didn't cover that recent history. He responded by handing me a dry historical pamphlet on the Korean and Vietnam wars and offering to give me extra credit if I wrote a report on them. Not the first (or last) time a supervisor would successfully quiet an annoying inquiry from me by "gifting" me with extra work. 

Faced with a similar question about 9/11 from a college student whose entire life had been shaped by its aftermath, I looked out at the small sea of young faces, all wanting explanations. I responded with a question. Who should decide what belongs in an "aftermath" exhibition? Would it be about Al-Qaeda, airport security, the Patriot Act, respiratory carcinoma, Afghanistan & Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, immigrant detention, "Come from Away," scholarship funds, drone technology, political polarization? Would it be appropriate to speak more of the actions of a nation or the actions of individuals? Where would we draw the line?

Perhaps, that is the core paradoxical lesson of a "memorial museum." Honoring 2983 victims and the hundreds of survivors and responders (some of whom later became victims) means honoring the idiosyncrasy of individual lives. And yet, doing so within a "national" museum raises the specter of that singular entity-- the nation. The nation changed and acted in impactful ways in response to its collective trauma. All of us alive 25 years later are left to consider the relationship between individual freedom and collective response. To reject the nihilistic logic of terrorism, we must continue to struggle with the boundaries between collective action, collective guilt, and collective responsibility. As Jeffrey Goldberg also recently concluded following a news analysis program focused on the geopolitical impacts of 9/11, we owe it to the victims to imagine a better world and to work in our own, individual ways, to see it come into being.