Historicizing 9/11

I contenuti

As the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, the contributors to this issue of Radical History Review discuss the meanings of 9/11 and critically investigate the ties between memorializing and mythologizing. They probe the contested understandings of the attacks in political rhetoric, policy explanations, cinema, literature, visual arts, photography, public spaces, museums, archives, and education. One article examines the relationship of changing accounts of 9/11 to the shifting directions of US foreign policy; another, to the FBI's war on terror at home. In an interview, the historian Andrew Bacevich links 9/11 to perpetual warfare and a crisis of civilian control over the military. Other contributors analyze the changing meanings of the memorial to the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon in Arlington National Cemetery and explore the role of victims' families in struggles over memorialization at the World Trade Center site.