Highlights Archives
The Road from 9/11
Forty years ago, workers began to erect the World Trade Center. Before it was finished, Wisconsin sociologist Richard Quinney was on hand with his camera to document its construction. His color slides remain a poignant reminder of the community of people who created the Twin Towers and the dream that they represented to the architects, contractors and craftsmen who brought them into being.
Thirty-five years later, other images of the towers were burned into our memory when they came crashing down in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Since that day, the Society library has been performing its role as a keeper of our collective memory by gathering more than 150 different publications about the day's events.
Those range from President Bush's Declaration of National Emergency in Response to Terrorist Attacks, issued immediately after the tragedy, to this summer's bestselling overview, The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.
Firsthand evidence gathered by the library includes several books of photographs taken that day, anthologies of interviews with survivors, and memoirs by the firefighters and others who responded to the emergencies in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The textual and graphic record of 9/11 held at the Society — massive official government reports, slim pamphlets of fringe advocacy groups, microfilmed newspapers, videotaped newsreel footage, Richard Quinney's tiny color slides, and more — will ensure that future generations can learn what happened on that day through the eyes of participants.
In some ways we were all participants. In Wisconsin, as elsewhere across the nation, the day prompted community gatherings such as that on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Library Mall on September 14, 2001 (pictured in the photo collage above). As iconic moments such as 9/11 recede into memory, they re-emerge as new cultural artifacts like ABC's controversial made-for-TV fictional version, The Path to 9/11. It is therefore crucial that comprehensive collections of firsthand evidence about them, assembled from the broadest possible spectrum of opinion and experience, should be preserved for posterity.
:: Posted September 11, 2006
|
