This year marks the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA. This guide contains links to a variety of resources to help you understand this defining moment in modern American history.
September 11, 2001: The Day That Changed the World
This educational exhibition recounts the events of September 11, 2001, through the personal stories of those who witnessed and survived the attacks. Told across 14 posters, this exhibition includes archival photographs and images of artifacts from the Museum’s permanent collection. On display at the Lewis Library - Loyola University Libraries, 6th Floor Corboy Law Center, Water Tower Campus.
The Submission
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An alternate history of Twin Tower memorialization, Waldman’s novel dares to ask the question: to whom does 9/11 belong? Claire Burwell, whose husband died in the attacks, certainly claims some ownership. With it, she fights for the memorial that she feels honors her husband and the other victims most: a multimedia garden designed, as it turns out, by an unimposing architect named Mohammad Khan. When Mohammad–Mo, as he prefers–is revealed as its creator, though, America loses its collective mind. This is the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy taken to the art world, but with maturity and grace, and with incisive results.
The Emperor's Children
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his book is, on the surface, a story of three Ivy-educated friends who, at the age of 30 in the year 2001, are struggling to reconcile their lives with what they believe they deserve. The reader knows that the 9/11 attacks are forthcoming, a shadow looming over the oblivious trio of friends. This book differs from many of the other works of fiction listed here because it does not begin with the 9/11 attacks, it ends with them.
Falling Man
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Escaping from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, Keith makes his way to the uptown apartment where his ex-wife and young son are living and considers how the day's events have irrevocably changed his perception of the world.
Windows on the World
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Captures the individual voices of a group of diverse and doomed people who come together in one historic moment in the Windows on the World restaurant on September 11, 2001.
Home Boy
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Three young Pakistani men in New York City at the turn of the millennium have the guts to claim the place as their own. But when they embark on a road trip to the hinterland weeks after 9/11 in search of the Shaman, a Gatsbyesque compatriot who seemingly disappears into thin air, things go horribly wrong. Suddenly, they find themselves in a changed, charged America.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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One of the best known novels addressing the events of 9/11, Foer tells the story of Oskar Schell, a precocious nine-year-old boy whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. Schell embarks on a journey through New York City, searching for the lock that matches a key left behind by his father. It is a scavenger hunt and a search to connect with the father he has lost. Schell is a character that is easy to fall in love with, he is quirky and ambitious, full of ideas and interests. Foer also weaves in stories of Schell’s grandfather, a survivor of the bombings of Dresden. This is an extremely touching read, alternately hopeful and heartbreaking.
The Writing on the Wall
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Schwartz’s novel marries NYC insularity to the attacks on the Towers by focusing her novel on Renata, a librarian with a host of strange obsessions for whom weathering tragedy is not new. The Writing on the Wall is interesting for the ways it doesn’t talk about the attacks on New York: Renata witnesses them. She walks home covered in ash. She worries–without need–that her boyfriend was lost in them. She rescues a girl from the wall of the missing. But she’s also already grappling with so many personal wounds that the day itself, though it forces her in new directions, doesn’t become central to her story. This is 9/11 from the perspective of the somewhat detached. A strange, mysterious, and often moving book.
Ask Me No Questions
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Fourteen-year-old Nadira, her sister, and their parents leave Bangladesh for New York City, but the expiration of their visas and the events of September 11, 2001, bring frustration, sorrow, and terror for the whole family.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
Rebirth
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REBIRTH is a riveting journey into living history, an act of personal witness to one of the most profound events in American history and the healing that has come in its wake. The result of a decade-long process by director Jim Whitaker, the inspirational story of REBIRTH follows the nearly ten-year transformation of five people whose lives were forever altered on September 11, 2001. The film simultaneously tracks, by multi-camera time-lapse photography, the minute-by-minute evolution of the space where the Twin Towers once rose. Both a singular cinematic and human experience, REBIRTH is deeply intimate and uplifting - providing a moving portrait of how trauma and grief metamorphose into hope and rebuilding, as the human spirit transcends the unthinkable over time.
September 11 Eleven Short Films About 9/11
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Eleven acclaimed directors each make an 11 minute short film in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The result is a daring and moving global cinematic reply that "forces us to look at the entire event afresh"
Parallel lines
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Filmmaker Nina Davenport searches for points of intersection between loss and meaning, suffering and hope, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Drawing on the conventions of the road movie, Davenport interviews strangers as she journeys across the country, finding that, despite their differences, many Americans dealt with the national trauma by referencing personal loss and longing.
In the shadow of no towers.
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The artist and New York City resident Art Spiegelman drew the comic board book In the Shadow of No Towers immediately after the September 11 attacks. The story follows Spiegelman's search for his daughter in the chaos, combined with his feelings of dislocation, grief, anxiety, and outrage over the horror of the attacks, through to his observations of the event's 'hijacking' by the Bush administration.
Generation 9/11
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PBS teams with Liz Mermin on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 to tell the story of seven young people whose fathers were killed on that day. The film explores how a man they never met and an event they didn't witness have shaped their perspectives and the world around them.
In the Shadow of No Towers
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It is about Spiegelman's reaction to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. It was originally serialized as a comic strip in the German newspaper Die Zeit from 2002 until 2004, and was collected as an oversized board book in 2004 with early American comic strips as supplementary material.
American Widow
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An autobiographical comic which chronicles the experiences of Alissa Torres after her husband Eddie was killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, leaving her to face a whirlwind of bureaucracy, politics, mourning, and impending childbirth and single motherhood.
The 9/11 Report
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Decades after the deadliest terrorist attack on the United States, an event that left no aspect of American foreign or domestic policy untouched, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, offers an accessible account of the most defining event of the century.
In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers
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Fall and Rise
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Mitchell Zuckoff’s Fall and Rise is an invaluable work of contemporary history, a stirringly compelling narration of the events of 9/11. Eschewing the political questions of why and how, Zuckoff focuses instead on reconstructing what happened when, what it was like to be there, to have been present on that day, under those circumstances, be it in a plane or on the ground, as a survivor or a rescuer. Detailed, powerful, revelatory, a work for now and for future generations looking for a deeper, visceral understanding of a day that reverberates still.
With Their Eyes
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With Their Eyes is a compelling collection of firsthand accounts written by the students of Stuyvesant High School who were just blocks away from the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. This thought-provoking work offers unique insight into the transformative events of that day and the ways in which it shaped so many lives.
102 Minutes
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At 8:46 a.m. that morning, fourteen thousand people were inside the World Trade Center just starting their workdays, but over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages. Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn draw on hundreds of interviews with rescuers and survivors, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts to tell the story of September 11 from the inside looking out.
The Only Plane in the Sky
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Journalist and historian Garrett Graff tells the story of September 11, 2001 as it was lived, in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on transcripts, recently declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, Graff paints a vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks. Beginning in the predawn hours of airports in the Northeast, we meet the ticket agents who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights, and the flight attendants inside the hijacked planes. In New York City, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable horror at the Twin Towers. From a secret bunker underneath the White House, officials watch for incoming planes on radar. Aboard the small number of unarmed fighter jets in the air, pilots make a pact to fly into a hijacked airliner if necessary to bring it down. In the skies above Pennsylvania, civilians aboard United Flight 93 make the ultimate sacrifice in their place.
After the Fall
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Recovering 9/11 in New York
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This collection of essays offers a rich variety of approaches to how people and institutions in greater New York have sought to find meaning in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, now a decade on. The views and practices documented here join memory, recovery, and rebuilding together to form a vital new chapter in New York's metropolitan history. Contributors contest the dominant nationalist narrative about 9/11 to generate a more local and socially-engaged form of scholarship
Tower Stories
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Damon DiMarco's Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 (20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition), eternally preserves a monumental tragedy in American history through the voices of the people who were in New York City on that fateful day.
A Decade of Hope
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On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a portrait of tragedy, survival, and healing from the author of The New York Times bestseller Report from Ground Zero. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an occasion that is sure to be observed around the world.
Therapy after Terror
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Therapy After Terror examines the 2001 World Trade Center attack from the perspectives of New York City mental health professionals who treated the psychologically wounded following the attack.
America Is under Attack
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Narrates the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, from the plane hijackings to the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Nine, Ten: a September 11 Story
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Saved by the Boats
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"Presents the heroic sea evacuation of September 11, 2001 with narrative text and vivid illustrations"
September 11 2001
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Describes the September 11 attacks in the United States and presents several personal stories of tragedy told by New Yorkers who lived through the collapse of the World Trade Center.
The Survivor Tree
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"A family plants an American elm on the Oklahoma prairie just as the city is taking root--and the little tree grows as Oklahoma City grows until 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, the day America fell silent at the hands of one of its own. As rubble from the Alfred P. Murrah Building is cleared, the charred tree--its branches tattered and filled with evidence--faces calls that it be cut down. The only obstacle: a few people who marvel that, like them, it is still there at all. The next spring when the first new leaf appears proving the tree is alive, word spreads like a prairie wildfire through the city and the world. And the tree, now a beacon of hope and strength, is given the name: The Survivor Tree."
Towers Falling
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Jewell Parker Rhodes is a master of storytelling for young people, and Towers Falling is no exception. Set 15 years after the attacks of Septesber 11, 2001, Towers Falling is a powerful tale about a classroom of students in Brooklyn who weren’t alive on 9/11 but come to understand the long-lasting effects the tragedy has had on their community, families and the world as a whole.
Understanding September 11th
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Explains the historical and religious issues that sparked terrorists to attack America on September 11, 2001, including information on Islam, Osama bin Laden, and the Middle East.
