Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007)

by David Crew

Saul Friedländer’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, argues that the Holocaust must be understood as a European event. Without murderous German anti-semitism and racism, the Holocaust would certainly not have happened, but German policies could not have been put into practice on such a previously unimaginable scale without the acquiescence, support, even active participation of a wide range of historical actors in all of the occupied countries.

Friedländer shows that “the events we call the Holocaust” cannot properly be understood as the step-by-step implementation of a preconceived plan. Certainly, Hitler was unwavering in his belief that the Jews were Germany’s most dangerous enemy and that they must be eliminated completely, first from German, then from European life. Yet what the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” actually meant was neither clear nor consistent, even in the minds of Nazi leaders, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As late as the autumn of that year, it was still possible to imagine other (incredibly brutal but less systematically murderous) options, such as the mass deportation of Jews to northern Russia after the Soviet Union had been conquered. Yet the Nazi decision for genocide was not simply a response to the failure to defeat the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy in Russia. Friedländer argues that Nazi policies in occupied Poland between September 1939 and 1941 had already made genocide both thinkable and possible: “the ongoing violence in occupied Poland created a blurred area of murderous permissiveness that, unplanned as it was, would facilitate the transition to more systematic murder policies.”

However, it was the attitudes and behavior of Europeans in the occupied countries that permitted the Nazi fantasy of genocide to become a murderous reality. Many Europeans played active roles in the machinery of mass murder; the local governmental authorities in the occupied European countries who implemented the German racial laws, the local police forces who helped round up Jews for deportation to the death camps, the Eastern Europeans who functioned as guards in those camps, the ordinary Europeans who enriched themselves with Jewish property. Others simply remained silent, above all the political and religious elites. Some Europeans did resist. In Belgium, for example, resistance organizations worked with the Jewish underground to hide about 25,000 Jews. Nor did all the Jewish victims continue to follow German orders in the hope of surviving until the end of the war. In the eastern European ghettos, some Jews engaged in armed revolts. But the bitter irony of these courageous acts of Jewish resistance, such as the April 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, was that they convinced Himmler and Hitler to move even faster with the annihilation of European Jews so that Nazi Germany would not have to deal with more Jewish revolts.

Friedländer draws extensively from diaries written by Jews across Europe during the war. Their voices help to make this a powerful book. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Holocaust.

Related stories on Not Even Past:
The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II
Review of Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
Review of The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos
David Crew on Photographs from Jewish Ghettos during WWII

Debating the Causes of the Civil War

by Marc Palen

As we remember the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, we should also not forget that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of another tragic episode: this country’s Civil War that left more than 600,000 dead in its wake.

A torrent of controversy has in fact arisen alongside the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, the most prevalent being debates over the war’s causation. Perhaps it is to be expected. Ever since the conflict’s inception, scholars have hotly debated whether, for example, the crisis was precipitated by Southern economic backwardness or Northern economic nationalism; the institution of slavery itself or its possible territorial expansion; a conspiracy of the “Slave Power” or a conspiracy of Northern manufacturers seeking to exploit the agrarian South.

Earlier this year, Time ran a story on the prevailing view of the Civil War’s causation among leading academics. In it, James McPherson stated that “everything stemmed from the slavery issue,” and David Blight finished off the article with the conclusion that “slavery was the cause of the war.” Similar unicausal sentiments have since popped up elsewhere. With such strong declarations coming from such preeminent scholars of the subject and the era, it would appear that the debate has been settled.

Well, not quite. While this line of argument has certainly become the mainstream, in recent years the Civil War’s economic complexities have garnered renewed scholarly attention. Economic issues may not have outweighed the broader issue of slavery as the primary causal factor of secession and war, but, scholars have recently sought to show how the oft-overlooked international political economy influenced other causes, including slavery.

Complexity is Not a Lost Cause

Stemming from the common trend toward boiling down such a complex story, the age-old tariff argument has once again arisen. This, in large part, is thanks to the heavy-handed treatment of the subject by James W. Loewen, author of the popular Lies my Teacher Told Me. In a widely read February Washington Post piece entitled “Five Myths About why the South Seceded,” he has provocatively suggested that “tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them.” In response to such a bold claim, policy historian Phil Magness has offered a nuanced rejoinder, taking interested readers through the contentious tariff issue in the years leading to Southern secession, focusing in particular upon the very real debate over the tariff in 1860 as the high Morrill Tariff bill haltingly made its way through Congress. He reminds us that the tariff was indeed a prominent issue on the eve of the Civil War.

Magness is not alone in recovering the economic remnants of Civil War history. Marc Egnal has made a particularly loud splash with Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (2009). In it, he preemptively refutes Loewen’s statement, suggesting instead that in the 1860 election the tariff was “the most important economic issue.” More importantly, he argues that slavery alone as a moral issue “didn’t explain why the sections clashed,” and that the oversimplified “slavery” mantra was therefore “fraught with problems.” By concluding that “economics more than high moral concerns produced the Civil War,” he revives and updates the interpretation first put forth by Charles and Mary Beard that the war was at heart an economic and ideological conflict between the growing protectionist Northeastern manufacturing section and the free-trading agrarians of the South. Egnal suggests that this sectional divide was made larger as the Western states—for so long siding with the South on most political matters—began developing their own infant industrial manufactures and found their interests aligning more and more with the North. The rise of the “Great Lakes economy” became further entwined with Northern markets alongside the rapid development of rail lines and canals. Egnal does not deny that the Republican Party contained strong antislavery roots, but he does suggest that such sentiment was overshadowed by the party’s adherence to the Homestead Act, internal improvements, and economic nationalism.

Egnal’s interpretation has in turn led to a heated debate between himself and John Ashworth on H-CivWar, among others. With Ashworth calling conservative historian Charles Beard a “vulgar Marxist,” and charging Egnal as being “self contradictory” and suggesting that he minimizes the role of the millions of blacks at the war’s outbreak, both sides of the debate are worth reading.

Books on the Civil War’s political economic complexity continue to proliferate. In similar economically oriented fashion, John Majewski’s Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (2009) stresses the importance of the South’s burgeoning manufacturing sector, the development of state-sponsored internal improvements and centralized economic regulations, and the corresponding growth of protectionist sentiment, demonstrating that the Confederacy was by no means united behind the twin banners of states’ rights and free trade. My own forthcoming work in the Journal of the Civil War Era in turn examines the Morrill Tariff’s transatlantic traction, particularly how it both garnered anti-Union sentiment and Confederate sympathy within free-trading Great Britain. Nicholas and Peter Onuf in Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006) also spend some time on exploring the Civil War’s economic intellectual roots, and Brian Schoen’s The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009) does a particularly fine job of reexamining the international political economy and Southern political thought from the 1780s to the conflict’s onset.

None of these historians discounts the importance of slavery, but they each demonstrate that such a stand-alone descriptor proves inadequate. The influence of slave uprisings, abolitionism, and free soil certainly deserves center stage, but the above projects should remind historians not to lose sight of the international political economic backdrop along the way. Remembering the Civil War’s complexities is not a lost cause.

Photo Credits
Map of percentage of slaves in the population in each county in the slave-holding states of the United States in 1860. By United States Coast Guard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Richmond Virginia, Woolen Factories and Pontoon Bridge, Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress

A thoughtful historian on “The future of memory”

Our colleague Judy Coffin alerted us to this blog post on 9/11 by Claire Potter, Prof of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, aka “Tenured Radical.”

It is a thoughtful consideration of many issues connected with thinking historically about the events of September 11, 2001 and the decade since.

Especially striking to me is the push-pull so many of us have been feeling about commemorating 9/11: a resistance to the public, politicized enacting of memory fighting against the irresistable surge of feelings and some kind of genuine sense of community.

I also am attracted to her suggestion that we think about the experiences of 9/11 locally and regionally, as we collect our memory documents and construct our historical narratives.

I wonder what everyone else thinks?

How Tall is Too Tall?

by Bruce J. Hunt

“How tall is too tall, how safe is safe enough? Before September 11, Americans thought little about such questions. And then the most extraordinary buildings in New York City burned and collapsed in front of a worldwide audience.” So begins Scott Gabriel Knowles’ recent online essay, “The Code War.”

While the 9/11 attacks put a glaring spotlight on international tensions, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers also raised troubling questions about the safety of tall buildings. The study of disasters, both natural and man-made, has a long history, as Knowles details in a new book, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. In “The Code War,” Knowles, who teaches at Drexel University (after completing his MA in the UT History Department in 1996 and his PhD at Johns Hopkins University), examines the ambiguous legacy of the investigations of the Twin Towers’ collapse.

After September 11

Sometimes when historians disagree there are fundamental issues at stake; sometimes differences of interpretation. Often the evidence is still being gathered, so any interpretation is open to revision. From a historical point of view, ten years is not a very long time, yet it is time enough to begin trying to explain the consequences of a major event like the attacks of September 11.

What does UT history professor Jeremi Suri mean in his “Global Brief” blog when he says that nothing changed and “9/11 doesn’t matter”?

In “The Worst Mistake America Made after 9/11,” Slate’s Anne Applebaum argues that, on the contrary, significant changes have taken place in the past decade.

Columbia University Economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a similar argument on his blog at Project Syndicate, yet he and Suri don’t disagree about everything, do they?

And Brian Michael Jenkins minimizes the impact of 9/11 in his op-ed in the Washington Post, Five Myths about 9/11, but he seems to view the past decade differently from Suri, Applebaum and Stiglitz.

If you want more, there are short, interesting takes on 9/11 from around the world at Open Democracy.

Joan Neuberger

Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill”

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

I recently came across John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered in 1630 on a boat to those about to establish a “New England” across the ocean from the old. Winthrop urged his congregation to create a “city upon the hill,” a model for others to imitate. Ever since Winthrop, the meaning of that city has been hotly debated. It is clear, however, that Winthrop’s city has come to stand for the ongoing experiment that is America: unique, exceptional, inspiring. Modern rebels, like those who have gathered on a platform of social and cultural conservatism around the Tea Party, a name full of references to Puritan Massachusetts, owe Winthrop, their alleged ideological ancestor, a careful reading.

Winthrop was a man of his age. He understood societies to be naturally divided into two camps: the “great ones” and the “inferior sort.” He thought that, for all their divisions, societies had built-in limits to social polarization so “that the riche and mighty should not eat up neither the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke.” Natural instincts pushed the rich to be merciful and the poor not to be too rebellious. A society that has lowered the taxes of the wealthy so that it could then dismantle both collective bargaining and public education would have puzzled Winthrop. He would have been surprised by last summer’s developments in Wisconsin.

Winthrop was a realist and acknowledged that there were limits to giving and forgiving. Individuals needed to put aside some of their wealth to guard against future hardship; they needed to take care of their family before they practiced charity. According to Winthrop, even the Bible found this prudence virtuous: the wise Egyptian Joseph put grain away and saved his treasonous brethren, the sons of Jacob, from famine when drought struck Israel. Winthrop, however, also thought that members of communities under siege demonstrated unusual degrees of solidarity. Natural law dictated that, under these circumstances, the wealthy would openly share their property. Winthrop would have not recognized his city upon the hill in America today: a society whose most needy voluntarily sign up to fight wars while the most powerful avoid such sacrifices and tirelessly lobby to get ever larger tax cuts.

But it is perhaps the failure of America to live up to the laws of a Christian community that would have disoriented Winthrop. Winthrop made a distinction between societies ruled solely by natural law and those ruled by the “law of Grace or of the Gospel.” Christian societies were bodies whose disparate parts were also glued by the ligaments of “love.” For all our desire to remember the Pilgrims as peaceful Christians who fled England to escape persecution, the fact is that Puritans were just as intolerant as their enemies, and Winthrop was no exception. Winthrop drew a clear line separating true Christians from the rest. He argued that the ligament of love worked best in communities that were ideologically homogenous. And yet, Winthrop did think that love caused communities to be more egalitarian. His model was the primitive Church whose members “had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own.”

Tea Party radicals, the alleged ideological heirs of men like Winthrop, might be surprised by Winthrop’s views on love and same-sex relationships. Winthrop’s descriptions of the love required to create his city on the hill are moving. His examples are all biblical. He explained that the love Eve felt for Adam was so carnal because her flesh literally came from Adam’s. But Winthrop also acknowledged the love Jonathan felt for David, the courageous shepherd who would soon dethrone Jonathan’s father, Saul. Winthrop was deeply aware of the force and depth of homoerotic love: “so that it is said [Jonathan] loved [David] as his own soul.” These two lovers would have their hearts broken when they were apart, “had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Winthrop also considered the love of Ruth and Noemi exemplary.

The city upon the hill that Winthrop sought to create in New England is a different world from that of his alleged ideological heirs. For Winthrop, the stakes of getting the city right were high (and they continue to be). To build a lasting “city upon the hill” the Puritans needed to create a society held together by charity, mercy, and love. A danger loomed: this new experiment could be overtaken by lack of either foresight or solidarity. Puritans then would meet the fate of so many failed social experiments. So let’s take Winthrop’s parting words as a warning: “The eyes of all people are upon us. So if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”

The text of the sermon can be found here.

President John F Kennedy on the City Upon a Hill: video/audio

President Ronald Reagan on the City Upon a Hill, text

To read more of Canizares-Esguerra on Puritans in North American see our monthly feature on his work from May 2011.

Portrait of John Winthrop, author unknown.
Page from John Winthrop’s journal: Wikisource, The Founding of New England

At the Debates: Rick Perry and Galileo

By Bruce J. Hunt

At the Republican presidential debate on September 7, Texas Governor Rick Perry surprised many listeners by responding to a question about the scientific evidence for global climate change by referring to the seventeenth-century century Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei. After claiming that “the science is – is not settled” on climate change, Perry went to say that “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at – at – at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just – is nonsense. I mean, it – I mean – and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”

It is hard to say exactly what Governor Perry intended by his reference to Galileo, but presumably he meant that the scientific majority isn’t always right – that Galileo was “outvoted for a spell” when he argued that the Earth goes around the Sun. As it turned out, Galileo was correct, and Perry seems to think that the relatively few scientists who now argue that humans are not causing global climate change may eventually turn out to be right as well. Though Galileo faced objections from some astronomers and natural philosophers, the people who “outvoted” him in a way that counted were theologians and other officials of the Catholic Church, first in 1616 when they condemned Copernicus’s heliocentric theory as “erroneous in faith” and again and more forcefully in 1633 when they found Galileo guilty of continuing to advocate Copernicanism after being told not to.

Much more on Galileo and his troubles with the Church can be found on the Galileo Project website at Rice University.

Painting of Galileo by Domenico Tintoretto. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

An Ode to a High School History Teacher: Or, What 9/11 Means to Me Today

by Rachel Herrmann

In 2001, I was a junior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City. On the morning of September 11^th, I was sitting in my second period AP US History class, taught by Dr. Melvin Maskin. On days when he was feeling particularly enthusiastic about a lesson, he’d scrawl things like, “The Doc is IN DA HOUSE” on the blackboard. He was always doing things like that: making silly jokes or referencing song lyrics in tests, to get us excited about settling in for a class period of history.

On that day in early September, we were talking about why other countries in the past had entertained economic and political complaints against America. Sometime after the first plane crashed, someone—I don’t remember who—came on the school’s loudspeaker and announced that a plane had just struck the Twin Towers. Dr. Maskin stopped to listen, and once the announcement had ended, he leapt into action.

“Get the radio!” he shouted.

Someone dug it out of the closet, and we turned it on and gathered around it to listen to the news while Dr. Maskin added side commentary. He was so riveted by the story unfolding around us that his energy more than anything else alerted us to the fact that the moment was important. There we’d been, talking about why other countries didn’t like America in the eighteenth century, and now here we were, listening to audio reporting that would be a primary source of twenty-first-century history tomorrow. We still didn’t understand why the Twin Towers had been attacked, but we had suddenly become historians seeking out the roots of those questions. For the last ten minutes of that class, history in Dr. Maskin’s classroom was the only constant left in my New York City.

The rest of that day was chaos. No one was sure which class period we were supposed to be going to, and eventually, most of the school ended up in the gym before they allowed us to go home for the day. In-between the random bells that signaled the end of a class, I waited in line to call my mother on a pay phone and make sure that she was okay (cell phone service was completely scrambled). The MTA was a mess, so public transportation options were shot and few of us had ways to get home.

At the time, I had a boyfriend who lived in the Bronx. His parents’ apartment building was not particularly close to the school, but it was closer than Manhattan, where I lived. After the school let us go, a group of us began the long walk to his house, where we watched more of the coverage on TV. Only later would we hear from friends at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan—our main rival—about students being able to see people jumping from the burning buildings, and watching the ash that drifted their way.

I will admit that although I understood the destruction, it didn’t mean very much to me at that time. In 2001 I had no blog, but a September entry from 2002 reveals that the anniversary did not weigh heavily on my mind. I remember feeling warmed by how New Yorkers bonded together, and vaguely worried, in the way of an underage teenager without a vote, about how politicians were using the attacks for their own purposes.

So what has stuck with me from that day has been Dr. Maskin’s behavior in our history class. Even in the face of the attacks, he retained the cool, analytical poise of a historian. On September 11^th, I learned how historians have to ask those difficult questions, even when present events are shrouded in uncertainty. He made us aware that we were witnessing history in the making, an event akin to our parents’ watching the moon landing or hearing about JFK’s assassination. It was a horrible, devastating event, but it was history nonetheless, and we had to engage with it. Dr. Maskin hadn’t planned it, but that was one of the best teaching moments that I’ve seen, ever. He was also one of the few adults who responded to a completely unanticipated occurrence in a way that lent structure to the day and the way we experienced it.

I am a historian because of Dr. Maskin. He was one of the first teachers I had who connected history to the present and who demonstrated why it was important that we continue to study the past. That was my junior year. In my senior year of high school, I applied to college as a prospective history major. That is how I remember 9/11: as the moment when I became a historian.

Photo Credit
Library of Congress Collection of unattributed photographs of the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, NYC. Via Wikimedia Commons

September 11, 2001

This week we will use the blog at Not Even Past to talk about the 9/11/01 attacks, their history and their legacy. We begin with an essay by Rachel Herrmann.

Photo Credit:

Library of Congress collection of unattributed photographs of September 11 World Trade Center attacks, NYC

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