Curating the 9/11 Museum Collection

"Memory is as the affection: we remember the things which we love and the things which we hate."
                                                                                                        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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World Trade Center "tridents" on display in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

The push to memorialize the WTC site began almost as soon as the debris had been removed. The cleanup of the 1.8 million tons of rubble and debris was a painstaking process as each piece of debris had to be carefully sifted and preserved as there were so many personal effects and human remains mixed in. A tiny fraction of that material was selected for possible use in a future museum and kept at Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. 

Eventually, more than 1,200 pieces of steel, as well as other objects, filled the 80,000 square feet of Hangar 17. The last piece of debris was removed from the Ground Zero site on May 20th, 2002 and the process of rebuilding began. 

This two session lesson plan aims to educate students on the process of memorializing those lost in the September 11th terrorist attacks and how 9/11 Memorial Museum curator, Alice Greenwald, has had difficult and heart-wrenching decisions to make in presenting the story of 9/11 in a historical museum.