And that's a more complicated story. Whereas the commemoration can often be very patriotic or even nationalistic, the more critical understanding can be — as the name suggests — more critical, and maybe not cast us in such a good light.
I think, especially for people who don’t remember it in the first place, there is a lot of uncertainty about which way you should think about 9/11.
And so, for those individuals or current students who didn’t live through the attacks, are they able to understand both sides? That is, to honor and commemorate those we’ve lost and comprehend the historical impact?
Some of it depends on their own particular family connections. There certainly are families for whom if they have a personal connection with 9/11, they commemorate it in a different way than people for whom it's simply something special that their local township or school might do on that date.
More generally, most students aren’t quite ready to make the transition into thinking of the history of their lifetime as “history.” That's part of what we [as educators] try to help students see. Not only the ways in which today's history is connected to decades’ or centuries’ worth of history that came before, but that even a lot of history has been made and, in turn, is being commemorated and argued about over the last 20 years.
There are a lot of ways you can historicize [a student’s] lived experience, but that’s a challenging perspective for an 18 to 21 year old to really grasp without being pushed to do so.
What then is the history of our students’ lifetime? If September 11th defined millennials, and the assassination of JFK baby boomers, what formative event(s) will define Gen Z?
I think the death of Bin Laden in 2011 was certainly a moment where people remember where they were when they heard the news and may have gone and joined with other people to acknowledge that moment.
Getting into the twenty-teens, I do think — and I'm not saying this is a tragedy on the scale of 9/11 — but I think for a lot of people, the election of President Trump in November of 2016 [was a defining moment] in terms of just how surprising it was compared to what people's expectations were, and how much it affected people who were very concerned about what his policies were going to be.
The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol is another one. My experience — hearing reports and not quite understanding and or even believing what had happened and then watching it unfold on TV — was eerily similar to the morning of 9/11.
Some of these individual events in the last five years could have a longstanding resonance for students, but in terms of what's going to define their generation going forward, it’s probably two longer-term developments. First, there’s the impact of the financial crisis, which they probably don't remember, but which affected many of their families in really profound ways.
And then it’s the long tail of COVID-19, epidemiologically, economically, politically. The memories of that are going to feel different and, similar to the financial crisis, its impact on daily lives took a while to really sink in.
Looking back on a post-9/11 world, what has changed the most in the United States over the last 20 years, for better or for worse?
I think you can put it into two or three major categories. First and foremost is foreign policy. This is outside of my immediate area of expertise, but I think it's most immediately clear with the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq (which is not technically connected to 9/11 but in some policymakers’ minds and public’s minds they were sort of connected). The idea of a global war on terror has fundamentally changed the way the U.S. and many other nations approach their relationships with the rest of the world.
The second impact would be the power of the federal government, with specific laws like the Patriot Act or the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, as well as the creation of Homeland Security, both as a federal department and in some cases state-level departments.