Historical Happenings

September 11, 2001, began as a normal day for Americans. The nation looked considerably different than it does today. The Internet had entered millions of American homes, but it had not yet become the constant presence in everyday life that it is now. Cellphones were increasingly common, but they were still primarily telephones. There were no smartphones, no social media feeds, and no expectation that breaking news would arrive in your pocket within seconds.

Americans consumed information differently as well. Newspapers remained an important part of daily life, but television dominated breaking national news. In polling conducted shortly after the attacks, 79% of Americans reported that television had been their primary source of information about what happened, the residual came from word of mouth (IE family, friends, coworkers, peers, etc.) and newspapers, though newspapers were slowly fading as the main source of information.[1]

For those too young to remember that world, these differences may seem insignificant. They aren’t.

Today, a major event can be photographed, recorded, uploaded, shared, discussed, and disputed by thousands of people almost instantaneously. In 2001, Americans largely depended on television and radio broadcasts, newspapers, telephone calls, and journalists to tell them what was happening. Information moved differently, and sometimes much more slowly. Understanding that difference is important because September 11 now occupies an unusual place in American history. It remains within living memory for millions of people while simultaneously being something younger Americans know only as history.

Those who remember the attacks may also remember where they were when they first heard that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center. They remember televisions being turned on in homes, classrooms, offices, restaurants, and waiting rooms. They remember watching without knowing whether another aircraft would be hijacked, another building struck, or another city attacked. For Americans born afterward, the experience is necessarily different. September 11 is encountered much as earlier generations encountered Pearl Harbor: through photographs, recorded footage, textbooks, memorials, documentaries, and the recollections of those who lived through it. 

The facts are known before the story begins: 

The towers will fall.

The Pentagon will be struck.

Flight 93 will crash in Pennsylvania.

Nearly three thousand people will die.

The people living through September 11 had no such knowledge.

That difference matters. Excessively so for an event still perceived as “living history” for millions. Perception matters. Always.

Historical distance allows us to examine the attacks, the failures that preceded them, and the decisions that followed with evidence and perspective unavailable to Americans in 2001. That scrutiny is necessary. The emotional weight of September 11 does not place the event, or the actions taken in response to it, beyond historical criticism. But distance creates another danger. Once catastrophe becomes familiar, it can become abstract. Repeated footage can lose its immediacy. A casualty count can become a number rather than thousands of individual deaths. A timeline can reduce hours of uncertainty to a neat sequence of times and locations.

Public history must resist both tendencies. To understand September 11 properly, we have to preserve both.

An Ordinary Tuesday Morning

Tuesday, September 11 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless across much of the eastern United States.[2]

People went to work. Parents took children to school. Coffee was poured. Traffic was cursed. Office lights came on. Across the country, Americans were beginning another weekday with no particular reason to believe this one would be remembered twenty-five years later.

In Lower Manhattan, thousands of people were arriving for work at the World Trade Center.

Elsewhere, passengers and crew boarded four commercial aircraft scheduled to travel from the East Coast to California. American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 would travel from Boston to Los Angeles. American Airlines Flight 77 would travel from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles. United Airlines Flight 93 would depart Newark for San Francisco.[3]

They were ordinary domestic flights carrying ordinary people: people traveling for business, vacation, work, family, and all the mundane reasons people board airplanes every day. Also aboard those aircraft were nineteen members of al-Qaeda who intended to turn the airplanes themselves into weapons.[4]

American Airlines Flight 11 departed Boston at 7:59 a.m.

At 8:46 a.m., it struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

What started as a normal day was now the second largest tragedy on US soil after Pearl Harbor. 

8:46 A.M.

Flight 11 struck the North Tower between floors 93 and 99. Hundreds of people were killed immediately. Evidence later examined by the 9/11 Commission indicated that all three stairwells became impassable from the 92nd floor upward, leaving hundreds of surviving occupants trapped above the impact zone.[5] 

For those of us who know the history, it is difficult to reconstruct those first minutes without allowing hindsight to interfere.

The people watching did not know there were four hijacked aircraft. They did not know another tower would be struck. They did not know either tower would collapse. They did not know that the Pentagon would soon be attacked. What they knew was that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

Television networks interrupted normal programming. Cameras focused on the smoke pouring from the North Tower while reporters attempted to establish what had happened. In New York, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel, Port Authority employees, and other responders began an enormous rescue operation. Then, seventeen minutes later, millions of Americans watching television saw something that made the nature of the morning increasingly unmistakable.

At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. [6]

Two commercial aircraft had now struck the two towers of the World Trade Center.

The United States was under attack.

And it was not over.

The Pentagon

At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 struck the western side of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The aircraft carried 59 innocent passengers and crew members, in addition to the five hijackers. Everyone aboard was killed. Another 125 people, military personnel and civilians, were killed inside the Pentagon.[7]

For Americans watching from elsewhere in the country, the geographical boundaries of the attack had suddenly expanded, and it was uncomfortable for all Americans. 

New York was on fire, buildings destroyed and thousands already missing, The Pentagon had been struck, and another hijacked aircraft remained in the air, its destination unknown and only speculation continues even today.

Nobody watching from home knew with certainty what would come next.

That uncertainty is easy to lose when reading history twenty-five years later. We can reduce the morning to a timeline:

8:46.

9:03.

9:37.

9:59.

10:03.

10:28.

Those numbers are useful to historians. They are also deceptive in their neatness. The people living through those minutes could not turn the page and discover what happened next.

Inside the World Trade Center

While much of the country watched events through television screens, thousands of people inside the World Trade Center were trying to escape. Emergency personnel were moving toward the same buildings civilians were desperately trying to leave.

It is tempting, particularly when commemorating a tragedy, to turn those people into symbols. Doing so risks stripping them of the very humanity we are trying to remember. They were people doing their jobs. They were firefighters, police officers, paramedics, building employees, and ordinary civilians. They experienced fear, confusion, incomplete information, and circumstances none of them could reasonably have anticipated when they woke up that morning. Thousands of people successfully evacuated the towers. Others remained trapped.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed after burning for less than an hour.

At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed.[8]

In less than two hours, the skyline of New York had changed.

The human cost was far greater.

Among those killed were 343 members of the New York City Fire Department. Law-enforcement agencies suffered enormous losses as well.[9] Numbers are necessary to document the scale of a historical event, but numbers also make it remarkably easy to forget what they represent. The firefighters did not wake that morning expecting to become historical figures. Neither did the office workers, restaurant employees, maintenance workers, tourists, or the passengers or flight attendants aboard the aircraft. They expected a typical Tuesday.

Flight 93

United Airlines Flight 93 departed Newark at 8:42 a.m. It had been scheduled to leave earlier but was delayed by the heavy morning traffic typical of Newark International Airport. The delay placed Flight 93 more than twenty-five minutes behind its planned departure time.[10]

There were 44 people aboard: 33 passengers, seven crew members, and four hijackers.

The first forty-six minutes of the flight were routine. At 9:24, the cockpit received a warning from a United Airlines dispatcher advising crews to beware of cockpit intrusion because two aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. Four minutes later, the hijacking of Flight 93 began.[11]

Passengers and crew members subsequently made telephone calls from the aircraft and learned what had happened in New York. Their understanding of their own situation changed. They had reason to conclude that theirs was not a conventional hijacking in which passengers might wait for negotiations or rescue.

At 9:57 a.m., passengers and crew began an attempt to retake the aircraft.

At 10:03:11, Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The 40 passengers and crew members were killed, along with the four hijackers.[12]

Evidence indicates that the United States Capitol was most likely the intended target, although the White House had also been considered during the planning of the attacks.

The passengers and crew could not save themselves, but much remains in recorded calls via aircraft communications. Their actions nevertheless prevented the aircraft from reaching Washington. There is no need to manufacture heroism here. They exemplified it in ways Hollywood could never.

Who Attacked the United States?

The September 11 attacks were planned and carried out by members of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden. Nineteen al-Qaeda-trained hijackers participated directly. Fifteen came from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. All four men who would pilot the hijacked aircraft had received flight training in the United States.[13]

Explaining why al-Qaeda attacked the United States is necessary history. It’s not the same as justifying what the organization did.

Al-Qaeda’s development was connected to the Soviet-Afghan War and the militant Islamist networks that developed during and after that conflict. During the 1990s, bin Laden publicly identified a series of grievances against the United States, including the presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia and American policy in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda incorporated those grievances into an extremist ideology that sanctioned violence against Americans, including civilians.[14] September 11 also did not emerge without precedent. Al-Qaeda had already attacked American interests, including the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The World Trade Center itself had previously been attacked. On February 26, 1993, terrorists detonated a truck bomb beneath the complex, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand.[15]

In the years after September 11, investigation revealed intelligence failures, information that had not been adequately shared or understood, institutional barriers, deficiencies in aviation security, and a failure to appreciate fully the type of attack al-Qaeda was preparing. The independent, bipartisan 9/11 Commission was created by Congress to reconstruct what had happened and determine how such an attack had been possible. Its investigation ultimately examined not only al-Qaeda but intelligence collection and analysis, aviation security, the FAA and military response, emergency preparedness, foreign policy, and the actions of multiple federal agencies. Its surviving records now occupy roughly 570 cubic feet at the National Archives.[16]

An honest history must acknowledge those failures.

Doing so does not shift responsibility for the murders.

Al-Qaeda planned the attacks. Nineteen hijackers carried them out. Whether American institutions possessed information that might have allowed some part of the plot to be detected or disrupted is a separate historical question, and one that deserves examination without confusing a failure to prevent a crime with responsibility for committing it.

A Nation Watching

For most Americans, September 11 happened through a television screen. That may be one of the most difficult aspects of the day to communicate to generations who do not remember it.

There was no Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, or modern smartphone. Most Americans did not carry an Internet-connected camera everywhere they went.

Instead, televisions stayed on.

Contemporary polling found that 81 percent of Americans were keeping either a television or radio tuned to continuing coverage of the crisis. Forty-six percent reported reading newspapers more closely. Although many Americans did use the Internet for updates, television remained overwhelmingly dominant.[17]

Millions of people therefore watched many of the same images at approximately the same time:

The smoke.

The second aircraft.

The fires.

People running through Manhattan.

The collapse of the towers.

The streets covered in ash.

And, perhaps most importantly, they watched without knowing when it would stop.

Americans worried about relatives working in New York and Washington. Parents wondered what to tell children watching beside them. Telephone calls traveled across the country as people checked on friends and family. Sixty-three percent of Americans surveyed afterward reported calling a family member in the days following the attacks, while 55 percent called a friend.[18]

This does not mean every American experienced September 11 identically. Someone watching from a classroom in Texas did not experience what an office worker escaping Lower Manhattan experienced, just as neither experienced what a firefighter entering the North Tower did. Those experiences should not be made equivalent, but they are all part of the history. The attacks killed people in three locations. The experience of watching them unfold reached across an entire country.

2,977

By the end of September 11, 2,977 victims had been killed.

That number excludes the nineteen hijackers.

Of the victims, 2,753 were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77, and 40 aboard Flight 93. They came from more than ninety nations and represented different faiths, ethnicities, professions, economic circumstances, and ages.[19]

We need the number because history requires scale, but 2,977 is large enough to become abstract. So, it is worth stopping here.

These were not 2,977 people who existed only on September 11.

They had lives on September 10.

They had appointments later in the week. They had unfinished work sitting on desks. Some had children waiting for them. Some had parents expecting telephone calls. Some were newly married, and others had been married for decades. Some had plans for the weekend. Some were probably irritated that they had to go to work at all. They were people engaged in the mundane business of living. And then, because of decisions made by nineteen men they had never met, those ordinary lives collided with history.

For those born after September 11, perhaps this is the most important thing to understand.

The people in those photographs did not know they were living in a historical photograph.

The Days After

The history of September 11 did not end when the North Tower fell.

Rescue became recovery. Families searched for missing relatives. Photographs and notices appeared throughout New York as people sought information about loved ones who had not returned home. Firehouses and police departments mourned extraordinary losses. Funerals followed.

Across the country, grief existed alongside fear that another attack might follow.

There was also a powerful desire for solidarity. Americans donated blood, contributed money, attended vigils, displayed flags, thanked emergency workers, and reached out to strangers. Public confidence in institutions and support for national action shifted dramatically in the immediate aftermath, but the aftermath was never a simple story of national unity.

Much akin to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in regard to the treatment of Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, Sikh Americans, South Asian Americans, and people merely perceived to belong to those groups also faced harassment, threats, vandalism, assaults, arson, and, in some cases, murder. Within days, the FBI had opened dozens of investigations into retaliatory hate crimes.[20] That belongs in the history too. Acknowledging it does not diminish the national grief that followed September 11. Nor does the extraordinary solidarity displayed by millions of Americans erase the violence directed at innocent Americans by others.

Both happened.

The historian’s responsibility is not to choose whichever version of the aftermath produces the more comfortable national story. It is to preserve the evidence.

A Different America

September 11 profoundly changed American government and society.

Commercial aircraft across the United States were grounded. Aviation security was transformed and eventually federalized. Congress expanded federal counterterrorism powers. Intelligence and national-security institutions were reorganized. The United States began military operations in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that had provided the organization sanctuary.

The attacks also changed how Americans thought about airports, public spaces, national security, foreign terrorism, surveillance, and the possibility of attack within the United States. Some of the government’s responses enjoyed enormous public support when they were enacted. Others produced controversy at the time or in subsequent years. Some had consequences that Americans making decisions in the autumn of 2001 could not yet foresee.

Those decisions deserve histories of their own and also deserve to be examined on their own evidence.

Understanding the fear and anger Americans experienced after September 11 does not require us to conclude that every subsequent policy was correct. Critically examining those policies does not require minimizing the event that produced them.

History can hold both ideas at once. It must be.

When Memory Becomes History

Twenty-five years is a strange distance from a historical event.

September 11 remains close enough that millions of Americans can still tell you exactly where they were. Survivors remain alive. Children who lost parents are now adults. First responders and recovery workers continue to live with the consequences of what they encountered.

At the same time, an entire generation has reached adulthood with no memory of the attacks at all.

For them, September 11 has always been history.

That does not make their understanding of it less legitimate. Historical distance can provide clarity unavailable to those caught inside an event. Documents become available. Investigations are completed. Claims can be tested against evidence. Decisions that seemed reasonable at the time can be reconsidered with knowledge of their consequences.

Living memory has weaknesses of its own. Human memory changes. Stories become simplified through repetition. Myths can become attached to real events until separating the two becomes difficult.

That is precisely why historical work matters.

But something important can also be lost as living memory fades.

A textbook can tell a student that American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.

It cannot reproduce what it was like to look at a television at 8:47 and have absolutely no idea what would happen at 9:03.

A timeline can tell us that the South Tower collapsed at 9:59.

It cannot recreate the uncertainty of the people watching it burn at 9:58.

And a casualty table can accurately record 2,977.

It cannot tell us who those people expected to become.

September 11 should therefore be remembered neither as mythology nor merely as data.

Its emotional significance is part of its history. So are the intelligence failures that preceded it, the courage demonstrated during it, the fear and solidarity that followed it, the injustices committed in its aftermath, and the enormously consequential decisions made by the United States in response.

None should be permitted to erase the others, and none should erase the people at the center of the story.

Before September 11 became a war, a political argument, a security policy, a memorial, a chapter in a textbook, or a subject historians would spend decades studying, it was an ordinary Tuesday morning.

People went to work. Children went to school. Passengers boarded airplanes. Coffee was poured. Televisions played ordinary morning programming.

And 2,977 people had every reason to believe they would still be alive when the sun went down. They weren’t. That is where the history should begin.

And that is why we remember.

Footnotes

1. Pew Internet & American Life Project, The Commons of the Tragedy: How the Internet Was Used by Millions After the Terror Attacks (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 10, 2001). Contemporary polling found that 79 percent of Americans identified television as their primary source of information about the attacks.
2. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004), 1.
3. Ibid., 1–14.
4. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “9/11 Investigation,” FBI History; National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chap. 1.
5. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chap. 9. The Commission determined that Flight 11 struck at 8:46:40 a.m., cutting through floors 93 through 99, and found evidence that all three stairwells became impassable from the 92nd floor upward.
6. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chap. 1. Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03:11 a.m.
7. Ibid. Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37:46 a.m. The 184 victims associated with the Pentagon attack comprised 59 passengers and crew aboard the aircraft and 125 people inside the Pentagon, excluding the five hijackers.
8. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, NIST NCSTAR 1 (Gaithersburg, MD: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2005). NIST places the initiation of the South Tower collapse at approximately 9:59 a.m. and the North Tower collapse at approximately 10:28 a.m.
9. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chap. 9; National Institute of Standards and Technology, “FAQs—NIST WTC Towers Investigation.”
10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chap. 1. Flight 93 was scheduled to depart at 8:00 a.m. and took off at 8:42; the Commission noted that its takeoff was more than twenty-five minutes later than would ordinarily have been expected after leaving the gate.
11. Ibid. United Airlines transmitted a cockpit-intrusion warning that reached Flight 93 at 9:24 a.m.; the hijacking began at approximately 9:28.
12. Ibid. The Commission’s reconstruction, using radar, air-traffic-control records, the flight-data recorder, cockpit-voice recorder, and other evidence, places Flight 93’s crash at 10:03:11 a.m.
13. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “9/11 Investigation,” FBI History. The FBI identifies fifteen hijackers as Saudi nationals, two as citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one as Egyptian, and one as Lebanese. All four pilot-hijackers received flight instruction in the United States.
14. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, chaps. 2 and 5.
15. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “World Trade Center Bombing 1993,” FBI History.
16. National Archives and Records Administration, “9/11 Commission Records.” The independent bipartisan Commission transferred approximately 570 cubic feet of textual investigative records to the National Archives after completing its work in 2004. See also NARA, “9/11 Commission Series” and “9/11 Federal Aviation Administration Records.”
17. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Other Important Findings and Analyses,” September 19, 2001. Eighty-one percent of respondents reported keeping television or radio tuned to continuing news, while 46 percent reported following newspapers more closely.
18. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Commons of the Tragedy. Sixty-three percent of Americans reported calling a family member following the attacks and 55 percent called a friend.
19. National September 11 Memorial & Museum, “9/11 FAQs” and “In Memoriam.” The memorial records 2,977 victims: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77, and 40 aboard Flight 93. The victims represented more than ninety nations.
20. U.S. Department of Justice, Community Relations Service, “Post September 11th Terrorist Attacks Backlash Against Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Communities”; Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Department of Justice, press briefing, September 17, 2001. Six days after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller reported that the Bureau had already initiated forty hate-crime investigations involving reported attacks against Arab American citizens and institutions.

Selected Primary and Archival Resources for Further Reading

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004.

National Archives and Records Administration. “9/11 Commission Records.” The collection contains the Commission’s surviving investigative files, memoranda, interview records, and related material.

National Archives and Records Administration. “9/11 Federal Aviation Administration Records.” The collection contains textual, electronic, and audio records relating to Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 and the FAA’s response.

National Institute of Standards and Technology. Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. NIST NCSTAR 1. Gaithersburg, MD: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2005.

Pew Internet & American Life Project. The Commons of the Tragedy: How the Internet Was Used by Millions After the Terror Attacks. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2001.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “9/11 Investigation.” FBI History.

National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “In Memoriam.”