story51.xml
Title
story51.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-02-09
911DA Story: Story
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I had arrived at the university around 8:30 am. I was working in my office, preparing for my 10:30 ?History of Germany? class, when, at around 10 am, a colleague of mine (Randy Lytton) who had just gotten in and had been listening to his car radio on his way to GMU, poked his head into my office with the news that ?something really awful has happened in New York?listen to the news.? Already radios and computer screens were filled with events as they unfolded both in NYC and in Washington. I decided to bring in a boom box radio into my 10:30 history class. Even though the course?s subject matter was rather far afield from the drama of the Twin Towers and Pentagon, I felt it important to inform students of what was happening. A number of them had not heard the news at that point.
In my class of about 40, I had several students whose parents or relatives worked at the Pentagon. I also had several students from Afghanistan?one of my better students was related to Masood, the Northern Alliance leader who had been assassinated only two days earlier by what was suspected to be Al Queda forces. When hearing the news about the World Trade Center and Pentagon air crashes, she rushed out of the room immediately. Two or three other students with Pentagon connections frantically attempted to phone their relations, to no avail since phone lines were apparently jammed with traffic. I simply kept the radio on until we all decided we would go over to the Johnson Center to view developments on TV.
After class, I emailed students in my afternoon Western Civilization courses (History 100), alerting them to events and asking them to read the ?Funeral Oration for Pericles? from The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides which was particularly apt under the circumstances. I also quoted it in the email message: ?Then, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him.? To be frank, I was worried about possible backlashes against foreign, particularly Middle Eastern students. I also went to my afternoon classes with the quotation in hand, in order to let students know that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day. Later on, the Western Civilization students mentioned how appropriate that felt the Thucydides quote to be. It was unfortunate but true that the events of September 11 allowed history students to see connections between the past and present they had not thought about or reflected upon before. For the freshmen Western Civilzation students in particular, the course now did not seem to deal with remote events and persons, but had meaning for them today.
In my class of about 40, I had several students whose parents or relatives worked at the Pentagon. I also had several students from Afghanistan?one of my better students was related to Masood, the Northern Alliance leader who had been assassinated only two days earlier by what was suspected to be Al Queda forces. When hearing the news about the World Trade Center and Pentagon air crashes, she rushed out of the room immediately. Two or three other students with Pentagon connections frantically attempted to phone their relations, to no avail since phone lines were apparently jammed with traffic. I simply kept the radio on until we all decided we would go over to the Johnson Center to view developments on TV.
After class, I emailed students in my afternoon Western Civilization courses (History 100), alerting them to events and asking them to read the ?Funeral Oration for Pericles? from The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides which was particularly apt under the circumstances. I also quoted it in the email message: ?Then, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him.? To be frank, I was worried about possible backlashes against foreign, particularly Middle Eastern students. I also went to my afternoon classes with the quotation in hand, in order to let students know that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day. Later on, the Western Civilization students mentioned how appropriate that felt the Thucydides quote to be. It was unfortunate but true that the events of September 11 allowed history students to see connections between the past and present they had not thought about or reflected upon before. For the freshmen Western Civilzation students in particular, the course now did not seem to deal with remote events and persons, but had meaning for them today.
Collection
Citation
“story51.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed December 24, 2025, https://www.911digitalarchive.org/items/show/7850.