Nation Marks 25th Anniversary of Sept. 11 Attacks
Americans on Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with ceremonies at the World Trade Center site in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and a field near Shanksville, Pa., honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
At the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan, family members of victims gathered for the annual reading of names, a tradition that has continued every year since the attacks. Moments of silence were observed at 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m., marking the times American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 struck the World Trade Center’s twin towers, as well as at 9:37 a.m. and 10:03 a.m., marking the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of United Flight 93 in a Pennsylvania field. Additional moments of silence marked the collapse of the South Tower at 9:59 a.m. and the North Tower at 10:28 a.m.
The attacks, carried out by 19 hijackers affiliated with al Qaeda, killed 2,977 people, not including the 19 hijackers themselves, and set in motion two decades of American military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, sweeping changes to domestic security and air travel, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It remains the single deadliest terrorist attack in world history and the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officers in U.S. history, with 343 members of the Fire Department of New York and 72 law enforcement officers killed in the response.
A Quarter-Century of Change
The anniversary arrives at a moment when the country looks markedly different from the one shaped in the attacks’ immediate aftermath. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, launched in the name of combating terrorism, have both concluded, with the last U.S. troops withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 after nearly 20 years. The security architecture built in the years following Sept. 11 — including the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and a vastly expanded intelligence and surveillance apparatus — remains a permanent fixture of American life, even as debates continue over its costs, effectiveness and implications for civil liberties.
Air travel, transformed almost overnight by new screening procedures, cockpit security measures and no-fly lists, has never fully returned to its pre-2001 form. The image of American vulnerability that defined the days after the attacks has given way, a quarter-century later, to a different set of national security concerns, including cyberattacks, domestic extremism and great-power competition with rivals such as China and Russia.
A New Generation Confronts an Old Memory
Perhaps the most striking shift on this anniversary is generational. A quarter-century after the attacks, most of the nation’s schoolchildren, and a growing share of its young adults, have no personal memory of Sept. 11 at all. For them, the attacks exist not as a lived event but as history, taught in classrooms alongside Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination — moments that older Americans can recall with startling clarity but that a new generation encounters only through textbooks, documentaries and family stories.
Educators and museum officials have spent recent years adapting how the day is taught, emphasizing primary-source materials, survivor testimony and archival footage to convey the scale and shock of the attacks to students born long after they occurred. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which first opened to the public in 2011, has increasingly framed itself as an educational institution as much as a memorial, aiming to preserve firsthand accounts before the generation that lived through the attacks passes from public life.
The Toll That Continues
For survivors, first responders and victims’ families, the milestone anniversary has renewed attention on the long-term health consequences faced by those who worked at Ground Zero in the attacks’ aftermath. Thousands of first responders and recovery workers have since been diagnosed with cancers and respiratory illnesses linked to exposure to toxic dust and debris during the monthslong recovery effort. Advocacy groups representing responders and survivors have continued to press Congress for sustained federal funding for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides medical monitoring and treatment to those exposed.
In the years since the attacks, thousands of responders have died from illnesses connected to their service at Ground Zero, and some advocates note that the number of first responders who have died from Sept. 11-related illnesses now rivals the number killed in the attacks themselves.
A Site of Mourning and Resilience
In New York, the twin reflecting pools that now stand where the towers once fell continue to draw visitors from around the world, their bronze parapets inscribed with the names of every person killed in the 2001 attacks as well as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. One World Trade Center, the 1,776-foot skyscraper that rose on the site in the years following the attacks, has become a fixture of the lower Manhattan skyline, a deliberate architectural statement of resilience built beside the footprints of the fallen towers.
At the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va., 184 illuminated benches, each inscribed with the name of a victim from the attack on the Pentagon or aboard American Airlines Flight 77, were arranged in rows corresponding to the ages of those killed. In Shanksville, the Flight 93 National Memorial marked the 40 passengers and crew members who died after the plane crashed into a field, their actions credited with preventing the hijacked aircraft from reaching its intended target in Washington.
The day also remains a touchstone in American political and cultural life, invoked frequently in debates over national security, immigration and foreign policy in the years since. Presidents of both parties have marked the anniversary with visits to the memorial sites, and flags were lowered to half-staff at the White House and other federal buildings nationwide Friday in observance of the day.
Twenty-five years on, the site of the fallen towers remains both a place of mourning and, for many New Yorkers and Americans more broadly, a symbol of the country’s capacity to rebuild.
