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

Mary Marshall Clark

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.	1
Given the nature of the attacks and the need for government response to them, it is no surprise that an official public interpretation of the meaning of September 11 was generated soon after the events occurred. This dominant account portrayed a nation unified in grief; it allowed government officials to claim that there is a public consensus that September 11 was a turning point in the nation's history that has clear implications for national and foreign policy. It is important to remember that this consensus was constructed not by those who lived through the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, but by those who observed it and had political reasons to interpret it as they did.	2
Columbia University's Oral History Research Office and the university's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy created the September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project within days of the attacks to explore a variety of memories and interpretations of the events and their aftermath that we believed could only be constructed over time through personal accountings of the catastrophe. Peter Bearman, a sociologist interested in the formation of identity in the wake of such events, and I co-founded this longitudinal oral history study in which sample groups from a pool of four hundred people will be interviewed three times over a three-year period. The project's purpose is to understand whether the catastrophe and its aftermath constitute a turning point in the lives and the imaginations of those both directly and indirectly affected. We used a modified life history approach in which we asked interviewees to talk about the meaning of the terrorist attacks in the context of their life stories and their understanding of the historical importance of September 11. In an effort to expand beyond the predicted formation of a unified collective memory based only on the experiences of those who were most dramatically affected by September 11, we attempted to interview people with widely different experiences, including many who were not close to the site of ground zero and some who were discriminated against in the aftermath. While most of the interviews were conducted in New York, we also collected interviews in New Jersey, Boston, and Washington.	. . .