Colleges offering courses that examine Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks from scholarly perspective
The Star-Ledger
September 26, 2011
When he was 8 years old, Andy Martinez stood outside his hilltop West Orange school with his classmates and watched the World Trade Center burning in the distance.
The third grader was unsure what was going on.
"We were watching it from the football field," said Martinez, now 18, of South Orange. "I got pulled out of school."
A decade later, Martinez is studying exactly what happened that day as one of 140 students in "The Contemporary American: The 10th Anniversary of 9/11," an American Studies class at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He will spend the next semester learning everything from the origin of the World Trade Center to the history of terrorism and the reasons behind the war in Iraq.
The class is one of dozens of college courses, seminars and conferences across the country taking a scholarly look at the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. For many undergraduates, who were children on 9/11, it will be the first time they have taken an in-depth look at all aspects of the attacks and their aftermath.
