For millions of Americans, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 remain a visceral memory: Where they were, what they were doing and how they felt when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
But for an increasingly large share of the country, 9/11 is something different — history.
“We’re in that moment,” Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said Thursday. “You have a whole new generation. For them, it is truly only history, instead of lived history.”
Twenty-five years after the attacks, that transition has placed a growing responsibility on the museum, which, months after 9/11, was charged by Congress with documenting the attacks and preserving the physical record for future generations. Its collection now includes more than 600 objects and 1,000 photographs related to the attacks and their aftermath.
This week, dozens of those objects emerged from storage: fuselage pieces from the plane that flew into the Pentagon, seat belts from the one that crashed in the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a damaged World Trade Center stairwell sign, a clock knocked from the wall of the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building, the tools of an ironworker who helped clear Ground Zero and the purse of a woman who escaped the South Tower.
On Thursday at the museum, those artifacts sat on open tables, separated from visitors by nothing but time.
The presentation offered a glimpse into how one of the most consequential events in modern American history is passing from collective memory into a historical record — and how museum curators decide what future generations will know about a day they never experienced.
This work is unfolding as the Trump administration wages a broader campaign against the Smithsonian’s approach to American history. The Trump administration has scrutinized the institution’s historical framing, curatorial processes and use of collections.
On July 4, the White House released a 162-page reportaccusing the American history museum of “extreme political activism” and blaming its leaders for erasing the country’s heritage. In the report, officials mentioned Hartig more than 200 times, accusing her of being more interested in “political activism than historical scholarship.” Weeks later, Trump said in an executive order that Smithsonian leaders had used history to advance ideological goals and directed officials to erect signs outside the museum warning visitors that it does not accurately reflect American history. (So far, those signs have not appeared.)
On Thursday, Hartig said the escalating scrutiny did not alter the 9/11 presentation. “It made it more important,” she said.
Twenty-five years ago, within days of the attacks, Smithsonian curators began discussing what to collect and how to preserve an event that was still unfolding. Jennifer Jones, a military history curator who helped collect material from the Pentagon, recalled how unusual that felt. Museums were accustomed to preserving “old things, old events,” she said.
“It was new ground for a bunch of us,” she said.
Cedric Yeh, curator of the museum’s 9/11 collection, said the original collecting team faced an overwhelming question: How could a small group of historians preserve an event of such scale?
They settled on three entry points — the destruction caused by the attacks, the first responders who rushed toward it and the recovery that followed.
“We were asked to preserve this for future generations,” Yeh said. Now, he added, “Future generations are the majority of our visitors here.”
Kenneth Cohen, chair of the museum’s military and society division, watched parents and grandparents explain 9/11 to younger family members who had no memory of the attacks. High school and college students found themselves standing beside older strangers who did. Instead of encountering the history only through artifacts and placards, Cohen said, younger visitors were hearing “a lot of voices and a lot of memories” from people who could tell them what they had experienced that day — and what it meant to them.
When asked whether that meant visitors who lived through 9/11 effectively became part of the exhibit, Cohen agreed.
“Oh, for sure,” he said. “Except you can talk to them.”
At times, Cohen said, four or five strangers would gather around a table and begin talking among themselves, with a curator occasionally asking a question to keep the conversation going. The artifacts became the catalyst for an “impromptu dialogue” between people who remembered the attacks and people encountering them as history.
A damaged stairwell marker illustrates how much history each can contain. After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the towers added safety features to their stairwells, including signs marking building floors, Yeh said. The sign was painted with material designed to glow if the power went out and had raised numbers people could feel if smoke obscured them.
Yeh pointed to material that once belonged to Isaac Ho’opi’i, a Pentagon police officer who was not working the morning of the attack but rushed to the scene when he heard what had happened. Ho’opi’i rescued people from the wreckage, and when the flames and smoke drove him outside, he started yelling, “Follow my voice!” to those still trying to escape.
An ironworker’s helmet represents the unofficial, ad hoc first responders: in this case, workers from around the city and beyond who headed for Ground Zero because they knew how to cut steel. As hopes of finding survivors faded, their work shifted toward clearing debris and uncovering evidence for investigators.
The museum’s understanding of 9/11 has widened over the intervening decades. Its collection now reaches beyond the attacks themselves to the impacts that are still rippling through daily life a quarter-century later: the creation of the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, changes in surveillance and intelligence and the lasting health consequences for people who worked at Ground Zero.
At Thursday’s event, Hartig said no one in the administration sought to influence the anniversary exhibit, which opened Wednesday and runs through Saturday, and they wouldn’t have been successful if they had. She also invited Trump and White House staffers to see the collection.
“This is our modern moment of change,” she said. “This is our inflection point. This is the world we’ve all inherited.”
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