The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report

One of the dilemmas in the debate over whether memory or history dominates the interpretation of major events is that few opportunities exist to study how people reconstruct the past before a dominant public narrative has been created by those who have a vested interest in defining the political meaning of events. Oral historians have often claimed that the lived experience of history is more complex than subsequent interpretations reveal. Rarely do we have the opportunity to document the historic evidence of that complexity through first-person interviews collected close to a historical event that has the power to transform our ideas about history. As a result, debates over the relationships between memory and history and between individual and collective memory often remain abstract and theoretical. In the case of an episode such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which immediately stirred a public debate over the ultimate significance of the events for American history and foreign policy, the stakes over how and by whom memory is shaped were particularly high.