Questions about this event? Please call 701-224-5600.

Interest flooded in from across the region, and we even received stories from native North Dakotans now living in California and Iowa!

To see a sample of the amazing stories that have been submitted, please click here!

Our goal is to explore the 9/11, 2001 attacks from a humanities perspective, to deepen our understanding of the cause of the attacks, and the impact they have had on our politics, our world standing, our sense of place in the world, our pop culture, our national psychology, our laws, our military and our military families, and above all our sense of identity 1500 miles between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The symposium has something to offer everyone, including networking with our keynote speakers, a bookstore, and an opportunity to learn more about how America has changed in the years since September 11, 2001.

There is still time to register for the symposium, the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony performance, and the evening session presented by Peter Bergen, one of the only men to ever interview Osama Bin Laden.

For more information, explore our website or call us at 701-224-5600 (877-846-9387).

We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!

If you like what you see, please keep in mind that we are still looking for stories to complete this project. The details from that that that still stand out to you and the things that you will take with you for the rest of your life are all things we want to preserve. If you are interested in being part of the project, please contact us at 701-224-5731 or alison.zarr@bismarckstate.edu! Additional information is also available here.

The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States is approaching, and we need your help. “We” is the Dakota Institute of the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation and Bismarck State College. We’re hosting a free national public humanities symposium at Bismarck State on Sept.  9-11, on the weekend of the 10th anniversary of the Al Qaeda airplane hijackings that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, smashed into the Pentagon in Washington, and crashed into a field in southwestern Pennsylvania.

It’s going to be an amazing series of events. Our purpose is to explore what happened 10 years ago and how it changed America. Nothing in my lifetime—not the Kennedy and King assassinations, not America’s moon landing in 1969, not Hurricane Katrina, not even the collapse of the Soviet Union—has transformed America as thoroughly as Sept. 11. Our post World War II national experience can be said to pivot on 9-11-2001. The terrible, unforgettable events of that day have transformed the way we travel, the way we think about our place in the world, our attitudes towards Islam and Muslim people, the way we interpret the U.S. Constitution, our attitudes towards torture, our relations with European nations and Canada, our sense of security (and insecurity), and even our national sense of identity.

We have a superb lineup of speakers: General Charles F. (Chuck) Wald (of Minot), former CNN anchor Chuck Roberts, Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, members of the current and former North Dakota congressional delegations, North Dakota public officials, and many others, including Lorry Fenner, who served on the staff of the 9/11 Commission. We’ll provide live remote video reports (by North Dakotans) from Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United flight 93 crashed. The Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra will perform a special 9-11 concert Saturday night at the Belle Mehus Auditorium featuring Mozart’s Requiem and music inspired (if that’s the right word) by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Friday, Sept. 9, will be devoted to “What Happened on September 11?” and our immediate personal and national reactions. Saturday, Sept. 10, will explore “How We Have Changed Because of the Sept. 11 Attacks.”  We are particularly interested in the impact of September 11 on the American heartland, including North Dakota. Although we are wired into the rest of the world now more than ever, and North Dakotans are sophisticated news consumers, the deep interior of North America is so far from the flashpoints and hotspots of the world that we sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about on the coasts and around the globe. We are embraced, for good or ill, by what might be called “the insularity of the heartland.” I’m interested in exploring this theme with our presenters, some of whom are experts on the psychology of national crises and their aftermaths.

On Sunday, Sept. 11, we will have an ecumenical spiritual gathering at Double Ditch Indian Village historic site north of Bismarck. There will be periods of silence at 7:46 a.m. (north tower), 8:03 (south tower), 8:37 (the Pentagon), and 9:03 (the field in Pennsylvania). Several religious leaders will be present—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Native American. At approximately 9:30 a.m., a special performance of Taps from three locations in and around Double Ditch will close the symposium.

BSC and the Dakota Institute have created a special website for the symposium: www.bscsymposium.org. The site includes a complete schedule, bios of the speakers, registration information, and reading and video lists for those who wish to prepare for the symposium.

Here’s where you come in. We are seeking to make contact with North Dakotans whose lives were especially impacted by the attacks and their aftermath. We’re not quite sure what we mean by that, but certainly it includes people who lost loved ones in the attacks, people who were in New York or Washington that day, people who were involved in the rescue and recovery operations, people who served in the military during and after 9-11, people whose work, family life, or places of residence were transformed by the attacks and all that followed. If you recognize yourself or your loved ones in this description, or know of people we should contact, please let us know. My email is printed below. We want to be very careful not to intrude on anyone’s sense of privacy or to exploit the cataclysm of Sept. 11 in any way. At the same time, we want to make sure that people who have stories to tell or who wish to be part of our deliberations are properly invited and treated with the utmost respect.

We want to record Sept. 11 stories—in two different ways. BSC’s Dusty Anderson is creating an informal documentary film of 100 individuals, self-selected or chosen at random, saying where they were, how they heard the news, and what their immediate reaction to the attacks was. Each statement will be no more than 30-40 seconds long. If you want to be a part of that documentary, let us know. Your story does not have to be earthshattering—the events themselves were earthshattering. We want merely to collect a range of North Dakota perspectives on a searing national event that we share in common. We’re planning to create a few scheduled easy-access opportunities for people to come to BSC or to the Kirkwood Mall to tell their stories on camera.

You can also write your stories or reflections on 9-11 and post them on the bscsymposium.org website. The more perspectives the better. The website has a special forum for your thoughts or recollections. Come September the whole nation will be looking back ten years after in sorrow, anger, bewilderment, patriotism, and grief. We want to create a safe space for people to pause and reflect.

Meanwhile, if you have time to read one book about all of this, I recommend Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Also, Fort Mandan’s David Borlaug and I will be setting up a portable video booth in Medora on July 24, on the Tjaden Terrace overlooking the Burning Hills Amphitheater and the badlands. We’ll film people’s stories from 5:30 p.m. until showtime for the Medora Musical.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt Center scholar at Dickinson State University, as well as Distinguished Scholar of the Humanities at Bismarck State College and director of the Dakota Institute. Clay can be reached at Jeffysage@aol.com or through his website, Jeffersonhour.org.)

Copyright 2011 BismarckTribune.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

“When tragedy strikes and hardship comes, people throughout history have turned to music to heal, and to express those emotions not easily expressed through words. We look to the great works of the past for inspiration and healing, and we relish new works that reflect emotions of our own time. Thus was the case with the tragic attacks on our country September 11, 2001. Citizens gathered around the world in churches, concerts halls, homes, parks, and even on the steps of our Nation’s Capital to use music to form community and try to heal the grief. And composers everywhere tried to make sense of this tragedy, and reach out to the world, through their craft. For our first concert of our 2011/2012 season, the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra is deeply honored to be part of the Symposium presented by BSC and the Dakota Institute on 9/11 and its impact on the heartland. The music we have chosen reflects both the old and the new, and also relates to ways our very own Bismarck-Mandan community used music at that tragic time.

The first half of our concert program features a unique collection of pieces by three living composers who wrote pieces inspired by and related to the attacks of 9/11. We open with the beautiful “Hymn to the Lost and the Living” by Eric Ewazen, a Juilliard faculty member since 1980. Mr. Ewazen states: “It is intended to be a memorial for those lost souls, gone from this life, but who are forever treasured in our memories.” Then we feature a piece that gives us a different perspective of 9/11, the perspective from the Twin Towers. Written by prodigy composer Jay Greenburg, “Skyline Dances” tells the musical story of the 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Composer Linda Tutas Haugen wrote “An Empty Space” as part of a larger work, Transformations of Darkness and Light, which was commissioned by the National Kidney Foundation to commemorate fifty years of organ transplantation. Each movement has a literary text relating to the varied emotional experiences of those whose lives have been affected by this lifesaving process. We close the first half with Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. Barber’s Adagio is widely considered a masterwork of modern classical music. On the advice of Arturo Toscanini, Barber reworked the Adagio movement from his first string quartet for a full string orchestra. Toscanini introduced Adagio for Strings in New York in 1938. Through Toscanini’s recording, the Adagio for Strings was Barber’s first work to reach a wide audience. Its sad but noble quality expressed the grief of millions when it was selected for radio play immediately after the announcement of President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. The piece has since remained among the first choices for music expressing sorrow and honor on the death of great public figures, and was also a piece frequently performed in the aftermath of 9/11.

We close our concert with the monumental Requiem Mass by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. On September 11, 2002, beginning at 8:46 am in every time zone, choruses and orchestras around the world performed the Mozart Requiem as a world wide commemoration for all of those who lost and all who helped others on September 11, 2001. The significance of the time is that it was the exact time of the first attack on the World Trade Center. One of the choruses to participate in this international gesture of healing was a community chorus in Bismarck, directed by Vicky Boechler. For our 2011 remembrance we wish to honor not only those whose lives were affected by the attacks, but also that special first “Rolling Requiem.” The Bismarck-Mandan Symphony will be joined by the Bismarck-Mandan Civic Chorus, the University of Mary Concert Choir (Dr. Tom Porter choirmaster), and soloists Jane Thorngren, soprano, Eunjoo Lee, mezzo-soprano, Kevin Courtemanche, tenor, and Edward Huls, bass. Don’t miss this extraordinary evening of music old and new that continues to inspire, continues to heal, that helps us to remember, and that gives us hope for the future.”

An important part of the upcoming Symposium is a project called 100 Stories: Perspectives from the Heartland. The purpose of this project is to tell the story of how those of us on the Heartland felt that day. What you remember, what stands out to you, and reflections that you will take with you for the rest of your life are important details that we want to preserve for future generations.

Please consider sending us your story and reflection on the 9/11 attacks. We would love to know where you were that day and the experience you had.

If you are interested in submitting but would like more information, please visit the 100 Stories project page.
We look forward to hearing from you!

Books
Steven Coll. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
Mary Dudziak, ed. September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?.
Michael Scheuer. Osama Bin Laden.
Lawrence Wright. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Video
9/11. A film by Jules & Gedeon Naudet and James Hanlon.
102 Minutes that changed America. The History Channel.
7 Days in September. Steven Rosenbaum.
9/11 Commemorative Set. The History Channel.

Our emphasis will be on what happened, how and why it happened, where we all were and how we initially responded, how the attacks influenced American life, particularly in the heartland, and where we are now ten years after. If you only have time to read one book to get ready, I’d suggest The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.  - Clay Jenkinson

A Place of Remembrance, at 7:30pm, Saturday, September 10.

Attend the Bismarck Mandan Symphony Orchestra’s performance, A Place of Remembrance, at 7:30pm, Saturday, September 10, at the Belle Mehus Auditorium. The BMSO will be offering a tribute to the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, featuring Mozart’s Requiem and works composed in response to the events of 9/11. *Ticketed event.