Transcript

Where were you when you found out? Over the generations, that question has been asked about many events: the assassination of John Kennedy, or of Martin Luther King, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, more recently the assault on the Capitol in, or earlier, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For anyone born around the early 1990s or before, one event likely looms over them all - the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, now known universally by just 2 numbers: 9/11, numbers you can’t say or hear or see without evoking the horror of that day and the myriad experiences of the days that followed.

As one of the pivotal moments of modern times, particularly in the United States, the events of 9/11 have been told and retold, shown and reshown, in almost every way imaginable.  In this episode, we’ll look through the lens of a somewhat less obvious perspective; the documents and other materials, and the people and institutions that preserve them, which help us to remember it all.

A special episode of Documents That Changed the World: Objects and artifacts from and about the events of 9/11, 2001

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. For those of us living on the West Coast, the news of that day arrived very early in the morning; I was woken up somewhere around 6am Pacific time, 9am back East, and being told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I vividly remember my first groggy thought – a dim memory that a fighter plane had hit the Empire State Building during World War II (actually, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flying in thick fog, in July of 1945, which struck the 79th floor, killing 3 people on the plane and 11 in the building). How could such a thing happen in 2001? Very soon, we knew the answer.

Several hundred business and organizational offices were housed in or near the trade center, so it’s not surprising that substantial amounts of material was destroyed, dozens of libraries and archives, including that of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which owned the site, and its original 1921 charter, thousands of negatives from JFK’s personal photographer, letters written by Helen Keller, legal documents from ongoing investigations by the SEC and EEOC, many important works of art, and records from the clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor of 7 WTC; Secret Service and CIA personnel went through debris as it was taken to Staten Island, looking for classified documents and hard drives. In many cases, companies didn’t know what they had lost because inventories were also lost, along with passwords to offsite online repositories. Not to mention untold personal items kept in safe deposit boxes and vaults.

Almost immediately, scenes from the Trade Center showed papers being blown out with the other debris, drifting down into the streets for blocks in all directions: bank statements, memos, calendars, photographs, everyday things that moments before had been meaningful and important and now just lying on the ground, in some places ankle deep in the dust, surviving by sheer luck for at least a while though quite possibly never retrieved or used again. Perhaps most haunting are the voice mails left from airplane passengers or from the towers to loved ones.

Recall that 2001 was early in the development of cellular and mobile technology and several years before the introduction of cameras in smart phones, so recordings made on that day were made primarily with camcorders and other video-specific technologies. French-American filmmaker brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet were working on a documentary about a probationary firefighter that morning. Purely by happenstance, he was called out to check a gas leak about a dozen blocks away from the World Trade Center; they heard an airplane that seemed far too loud and close and swiveled the camera just in time to capture the best-known recording of the first plane strike as well as apparently unique footage of scenes in the lobby and the early recovery efforts. The second plane was widely seen on live television. Only a single frame of crude security camera footage is known of the Pentagon collision and none for United flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. Following those initial moments, news crews and individuals fanned out to capture images of the scenes at Ground Zero and beyond; recordings of wall-to-wall coverage from a number of news sources is preserved by the Internet Archive.

In the first chaotic hours, there was a broad assumption that huge numbers of people would have been injured and taken all over the New York metropolitan area for care. But with no centralized place, no information system at work, to find or identify them, friends and families had no way to locate people who were missing. They began by contacting hospitals and trauma centers, often on foot, and then in desperation, to create flyers – single sheets of paper, in their thousands. At first these were completely impromptu and then rapidly began to converge into a loose genre:  usually with photographs, from yearbooks, vacations, weddings, parties, along with names, dates of birth, physical descriptions, what building floor they were on or company they worked for, and the crucial phone number to call with any scrap of information. These were posted on any available surface, and carried and shown on any camera that would look in the dimming hope that they would recognized and identified.

That December, Congress designated the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as the national repository for 9/11 collections. That now includes the Naudet brothers’ video camera, and yet more ordinary objects which became extraordinary: a squeegee which a window-washer used to cut through sheetrock to free himself and several other people trapped in an elevator on the 50th floor; clumps of melted coins demonstrating the intense heat – up to 1800° - produced by the fires; a stained napkin from the Windows on the World restaurant; a wall clock from the Pentagon stopped at 5 minutes before the time of the crash, likely because it was running slow; a piece of the plane which landed in the back seat of a car sitting in traffic outside the Pentagon and only discovered when the driver got home, after which she wrapped it in red white and blue fabric and crafted a special box to honor it before donating it. Perhaps most remarkable, to me at least, is the log book detailing every trip by Lorraine Bay, a flight attendant on United 93.  It’s charred and appears to show water damage, though is otherwise intact, and is one of the very few items to survive that plane’s crash.

Many other institutions collected and now hold related materials. The National Archives has the records of the 9/11 Commission, of the FAA and administers the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The New York Public Library has acquired over 1200 hours of videos taken by dozens of New Yorkers with camcorders in the week following the attacks. The Library of Congress has hundreds of oral histories of responders and a digital archive of Web sites from around the world at the time. And the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has tens of thousands of objects and art items, along with the collection of the competition to design the memorial site, now in the footprint of the original towers and listing the names of the 2,977 people who lost their lives on 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. There are also memorials outside the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Darker and more troubling examples exist too. Passenger manifests for the flights. Drawings and documents created in planning and preparation for the attacks. Evidence collected in the subsequent investigations. Medical records of rescue and recovery workers exposed to toxic materials at the sites. Reams of litigation. DNA used to identify remains.

The documents and artifacts, by themselves, say little, only what they were originally intended to say or do – recording a financial transaction, logging a flight, cleaning a window, looking for information about a loved one.  Now, however, they are able to tell even more stories, of the people, the events, the circumstances, including the telling details:  the charring on the notebook, the melting of the coins, the care taken with the plane fragment. And yes, the items that were destroyed, even if unremembered, tell their own stories as well, of loss, material and otherwise.

It is in the nature of institutions like libraries, museums, and archives to acquire and collect these kinds of items, to give them order and structure, to describe and organize them so they can be searched, found and consulted, and to preserve and store them to keep them safe and available for generations to come. They also provide essential context – not just keeping or displaying objects, but also describing their origins and paths so that their stories can be more fully appreciated, assessed, and reassessed over time. There are also the completists, people working to discover and share unknown, unseen photos, videos, and other real evidence, which does still continue to emerge, so that the fullest possible picture can be knows.

There is too, we must acknowledge, so much other stuff around 9/11 and its aftermath – reactions ugly and worse towards Islam and other communities, dramatically increased and pervasive security and surveillance, patriotism at times twisted into jingoism and nativism, the wars of retribution, they have their artifacts too. And the inevitable conspiracies, bogus or faked or misrepresented “evidence”, which is unsurprising given the extraordinary impact of all of this, the range of personal experience and reaction, a fragmenting and distributed media landscape, lack of trust in governments and institutions, alternate realities, much of which is enabled by digital and networked technology – these too, tell stories. This, too, is human nature.

So much of 9/11 is about loss, and rightly so – though also rightly about survival, service, sacrifice, rebuilding, resilience…and memory. I like to describe to describe documents – and I consider all the objects we’ve discussed here as “documents” – as remembering with us. Alone, they are merely things. Alone, we have our own memories. Together, memories are greater, the connection between a person, or community, and an object and its background, in the contexts both of its time and today, all of which can provide richness, texture, and depth. 

The documents of 9/11 speak, when we listen, of the events of a single day, and many days thereafter. Today, a quarter of a century removed, living memories persist, though inevitably, those will fade and pass away. “Never forget” is easy to say, but difficult to achieve without tangible reminders. That’s increasingly the case over time, as first-hand experience gives way to memory by way of “historical artifacts” in a glass case or an archival collection, true of anyone too young to remember the day, and as a result many of those documents and events will almost certainly be remembered and viewed differently as the years go by. How they will be seen and what people will make of them, and us, in another 25, or 50, or 500 years, we can only imagine.

References

9/11. Directed by Jules Naudet and Gedeon Naudet, Goldfish Pictures, Inc., 2002.

Adams, Frank. “B-25 CRASHES IN FOG.” The New York Times, 29 July 1945, pp. 1, 25. TimesMachine, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1945/07/29/284666792.html. 

AP Archive. Security Video of Plane Hitting Pentagon Released, Adds, S’bite from Judicial Watch. 2015. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SL2PzzOiF8. 

“Artwork Damaged or Destroyed in the September 11 Attacks.” Wikipedia, 20 July 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artwork_damaged_or_destroyed_in_the_September_11_attacks&oldid=1365082450.  

Dankowski, Terra. “What Was Lost.” American Libraries Magazine, 1 Sept. 2021, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2021/09/01/what-was-lost-9-11-libraries/. 

Dwyer, Jim, et al. “102 MINUTES: Last Words at the Trade Center; Fighting to Live as the Towers Die.” The New York Times, 26 May 2002. New York. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/102-minutes-last-words-at-the-trade-center-fighting-to-live-as-the-towers-die.html.

Goldenberg, Sally, and Nina Agrawal. “After 9/11, Documents Suggest, New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality.” The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2026. New York. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/nyregion/sept-11-air-quality-cancer.html.

“History of Smartphones.” Wikipedia, 8 Sept. 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_smartphones&oldid=1373868535#External_links.

“Jules and Gédéon Naudet.” Wikipedia, 28 Aug. 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jules_and_G%C3%A9d%C3%A9on_Naudet&oldid=1371722438.

Lives and Treasures Taken (November 2002) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin. https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0211/911-treasures.html. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Mystery Surrounds Loss of Records, Art on 9/11 - CBS News. 1 Sept. 2011, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mystery-surrounds-loss-of-records-art-on-9-11/.

September 11 | National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/topics/september-11. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

September 11 Television Archive : Free Movies : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Shanksville, Mailing Address: P. O. Box 911, and PA 15560 Phone: 814 893-6322 Contact Us. Flight 93 National Memorial (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/flni/index.htm. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

Stastna, Compiled Sarah Bridge and Kazi. “9/11 Anniversary: What Was Lost in the Damage.” CBC News, 21 Aug. 2011. CBC.ca, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/9-11-anniversary-what-was-lost-in-the-damage-1.1123528.

“The New York Public Library Acquires the CameraPlanet Archive, Historic 1,200 Hours of September 11 Video Archives.” The New York Public Library, https://www.nypl.org/press/new-york-public-library-acquires-cameraplanet-archive-historic-1200-hours-september-11-video. Accessed 8 Sept. 2026.

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