09/11/2026
In a Rutgers-Newark history course, students who grew up in post-9/11 America examine the attacks, their aftermath and the complicated history that shaped both.
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For Rutgers University–Newark Associate Professor of History Timothy Stewart-Winter, September 11, 2001, is not simply a date in a history textbook.
He was 21 years old, newly arrived in New York City and working at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, about a half-mile south of the South Tower, when he witnessed the second plane fly directly over his head and crash into the World Trade Center. From the 25th floor, Stewart-Winter watched the attacks unfold. After the North Tower collapsed, he left Lower Manhattan on foot, walking up the FDR Drive and across the Brooklyn Bridge through a swirling cloud of dust and debris.
He spent the rest of that fall and winter working near Ground Zero.
“It was a scarring and defining event of my young life,” he says.
More than two decades later, Stewart-Winter brings that experience into the classroom—but he doesn't teach 9/11 simply as a story of what happened that morning.
His course, 9/11 and U.S. History, asks students to consider a much larger question: How does one event fit into the complicated history of a nation?
“I stress at the outset that this is a course about 9/11 and U.S. history, not a course about 9/11,” Stewart-Winter says.
Read full story: https://go.rutgers.edu/9-11-class