What if 9/11 Never Happened?

I’ve just read New York Magazine’s fascinating feature, “What if 9/11 Never Happened?” In it, a number of people were asked to imagine that different world in which four planes were not commandeered by hijackers and sent on their deadly journeys. Of course, speculating about counterfactual history (the technical term for “what if?”) tells us nothing about history. Mostly, it tells us about the psychology of the author - their perspective on events, their understanding of what matters, their personal quirks.

I tend to agree with the writers in the piece who imagine a world not terribly different from the one we are in – different details, but shaped by social, political, and economic forces into more-or-less the same place we are now. Most of the writers who talk about politics in their piece assume that Bush would not have gotten a second term, or alternately, that his bullhorn moment would have taken place in New Orleans, not New York. Maybe, there’s no knowing. It is entirely possible, as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic suggests, that without 9/11, there would have been 9/12, or some other date, that bin Ladin really was determined to attack within the U.S., and September 11, 2006 would be different only in that the five year anniversary would still be a few weeks, months, or a year or two away.

For me, the most surprising piece came from real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller:

September 11 prompted this housing boom. Just before 9/11 we were in a recession; housing prices began to fall and volume really dropped off. We would have seen a continuation of a slide throughout much of the next two years. A run-up occurred as the result of the Fed’s post-9/11 action to drop interest rates, which led to a sharp decrease in mortgage rates. It’s that decrease that ultimately led to the price appreciation we’ve seen.

I was stunned at the parochrialism, but then I thought, no, this is no different from Thomas Friedman’s piece obsessing about China – these essays are about the personal focus of each author, not about history. And, this is New York Maganize – in New York, what 9/11 did to the real estate market is very important to a lot of people.

Notably, only Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, makes the obvious statement – 3000 people would still be alive.

Trying to Remember the World Trade Center

Via the AP and the Washington Post, Amy Westfeldt has penned an interesting article about efforts to preserve historical artifacts from the World Trade Center. Wreckage from the buildings, artifacts from the stores and offices housed there, and reminders of the people who worked and died there are all being stored in a giant hanger at JFK airport. This collection is meant in large part to preserve objects for later display at a World Trade Center memorial and at museums around the world.

Memorializing is tricky. Memorials try to fix in place a particular understanding, a certain viewpoint about the events they memorialize. But the meaning of any historical event changes across time, and so too do the memorials to those events. Memorials to Confederate war heroes, for example, are viewed quite differently now than they were when they were erected, even by those who think well of the Confederate cause. We can never know how the future will view the past, or how it will view us. Bart Voorsanger, who directed the process of collecting these artifacts, asks the right question, but it is a difficult one:

"I wasn't interested in our particular generation. They've already seen it," said Voorsanger. "If your grandchildren came to visit, would it mean anything to them?"

Yes, it certainly will, but what? Depending on its size and design, any World Trade Center memorial might simply mean a nice place to sit and escape the city bustle. Designed differently, it might mean “wow, this is a big space,” in the way the cathedrals of Europe do to many visitors.

This might seem offensive to us, but the reality is that generations who did not live through those moments will never experience a World Trade Center memorial the way we do, anymore than I feel the way about a World War I memorial the way a surviving veteran might. Alice Greenwald, the director of the planned World Trade Center Memorial Museum, notes in the AP article that what objects are used in the memorial will depend on what story the memorial is designed to tell. There is already a great deal of struggle over that issue, but no matter what vision wins out, the long-term meaning of a memorial is anyone’s guess. The builders of the Lincoln Memorial had no idea it would become an iconic background with a million different meanings in countless movies and TV shows, and we don’t know what the future will think of the World Trade Center memorial until we get there.

As Goes Billings, So Goes the Nation (I Hope)

I’m shocked, really. What is there to say? Students are apparently knocking down the door at Montana State University-Billings to become history majors. Someone find out what’s in the water in the dorms and send some of it my way – we could use it!

What is History?

If I'm going to teach anyone to think like an historian, we first have to tackle this question - what is history? Well, here's a baker's dozen of possibilities:

1. the things that happened in the past.
2. a record of things that happened in the past, written as it was happening.
3. a record of things that happened in the past, written after-the-fact.
4. any individual's thoughts, feelings, opinions about the past.
5. a highly specialized form of literature, based in part on past events.
6. a highly specialized form of literature, based in part on records of past events.
7. an academic discipline carried out by people with graduate degrees in history.
8. a set of lessons drawn from past events to guide us in the future.
9. a long list of names and dates.
10. ideas, concepts, art forms, etc., that are now out-of-date.
11. the unfolding of God's plan.
12. a section of the bookstore with a whole lot of books on the Civil War.
13. bunk.

People think they know what history is, and I think most carry around several of these definitions in their head at once, and others, too. I think the one I most favor is #7, and not just because of what I do. It's the least problematical - I can actually show you real, live human beings who work in universities, call themselves historians, and who more or less agree on a set of disciplinary practices. The rest I either disagree with, or would have a very hard time proving. Notice the difference between #5 and #6. Most people probably think historical writing is #5, or at least is supposed to be, but really, it's closer to #6. The past is gone, however present it may be. We have only traces, and we try to put together the jigsaw puzzle with only a few of the pieces. I pound away at this idea with students. The ones who get it usually wind up asking, "Wait a minute, how do we know what we read is true?" Aaaaahhhhh, well, now that's a question worth asking.

Don't expect me to answer it. (More on this later.)

Articles Worth Reading - Easter Island and New Orleans

A couple of articles of note:

There’s a fascinating new article about Easter Island in American Scientist by Terry Hunt, who teaches anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It details his research and that of others that seems to show that the traditional understanding of the island’s history is seriously flawed – humans may have come much later than previously believed, and rats, not humans, may have been the cause of deforestation.

I saw this other great article in my hometown paper, The Tennessean, about the new New Orleans phonebooks, but it’s not on their website, so I’m linking to the Long Beach Press Telegram instead. This article shows the kinds of information that researchers, including historians, can glean from non-traditional sources, like, say, phone books. Combined with call volume records from the local telephone service, we can learn a lot of things about how the recovery is going in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, home repair firms are doing gangbusters – and so are chiropractors. A lot of people, it seems, are throwing out their backs hauling construction material around. Remember, lift with your legs, not with your back!

Getting Back our Credibility After Bush

Robert Farely has a great post at Lawyers, Gun$, and Money about the French ability to outmaneuver the United States in the U.N. This one line, though, got me thinking.

Chirac has also done an impressive job of resurrecting French cred in the Islamic world, no small task for a country once bitterly reviled for its colonial brutality in Syria and Algeria.

One thing I tell my students - the only thing history teaches us is that nothing is forever (except maybe China). Once the current band of rouges in the White House is gone, we've got a long road ahead of us to clean up the mess. But if the French can restore their credibility in the Islamic world after Algeria, maybe we can, too. Of course, that war was over in 1962.