A New Collection Honoring the 25th Anniversary of 9-11 – Library of Congress – Blogs

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September 9, 2026

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Teaching with the Library Primary Sources & Ideas for Educators, ISSN 2691-6916

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A New Collection Honoring the 25th Anniversary of 9-11

A New Collection Honoring the 25th Anniversary of 9-11

September 9, 2026, Posted by: Colleen Smith

To mark the 25th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, the Library of Congress recently launched a new digital collection of nearly 500 first-hand accounts from responders.

About the Collection

The Benjamin Luft Collection of 9-11 Oral Histories contains 484 interviews of responders to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and some of their family members, as well as photographs and manuscript materials documenting their experiences at the site. The responders include police officers, firefighters, construction workers, demolition specialists, ironworkers, veterinarians, paramedics, telecommunications experts, chaplains and volunteers from near and far who came to the site to do whatever they could to help.

The interviews preserve not only the memories of a historic event, but also the testimony of witnesses whose lives became part of it continuing history.

Accessing the Collection

The Featured Content carousel on the collection homepage offers ten-minute video vignettes consisting of selections from a number of interviews, each covering an overarching theme of the collection. The complete interviews for those interviewees, including transcripts, can be found under “Related Items” in the right column of the item record for the excerpt.

In addition to the themed items, the collection includes 42 excerpts of around 10-15 minutes each. The complete interview for those interviewees, including transcripts, can be found under “Related Items” in the right column of the item record for the excerpt.

When choosing items for classroom use, teachers might keep in mind the sensitive nature of the events described in the collection and preview as appropriate. The notes section of each item record includes a summary of content to help guide selections.

Related resources

Teachers may also be interested in the September 11, 2001 Documentary Project, a Library of Congress digital collection that contains eyewitness accounts, and diverse opinions of Americans and others in the months that followed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93.

For either collection, teachers might select questions or follow-up activity ideas from the Library’s Teacher’s Guide for Analyzing Oral Histories to support students’ analysis of oral history interviews.