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Facing Today

Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.

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  • Remembering 9/11 Ten Years Later
    August 29, 2011

    911 MemorialIn the coming weeks, the world will mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in and around the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and on flight 93 over Shanksville, PA.

    Schools, houses of worship, and communities are exploring their own ways to remember the attacks and consider their legacy. How will your community remember? A critical part of the Facing History and Ourselves program considers how we choose to remember the past, and what those choices say about who we are.

    Will your community have a public commemoration? How is the anniversary being talked about in the various media that you follow? Does your community have a monument or memorial to remember the attacks? If not, are there any monuments or memorials in your community? What story do they tell?

    Below are links to several different websites that explore attempts to remember 9/11. As you view the sites consider:

    • Who is telling the story?
    • What story do they hope to tell?
    • Who is the audience?
    • What choices were made by those choosing to remember?
    • How do those choices impact the story they tell?
    • Compare the different choices individuals or groups made in their attempt to remember?
    • What is the message that you take away?

    Memory, History, and Memorials: 9/11 Case Study

    This link to the Facing History and Ourselves website Memory, History, and Memorials discusses the spontaneous memorials that people created after 9/11, alongside links to several resources about the challenges of memory in the first few months after the attacks.

    9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center

    Website for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, which will open on September 11, 2011 on the site of the former towers. The memorial site contains extensive resources on the new memorial and museum, on those who died as well as survivors and rescuers, on the history of the Twin Towers, and on responses, memorials, and tributes from many communities and schools.

    Tribute Center WTC

    Tribute WTC Visitor Center offers visitors to the World Trade Center site a place where they can connect with people from the September 11th community. Through walking tours, exhibits and programs, the Tribute WTC Visitor Center offers "Person to Person History," linking visitors who want to understand and appreciate these historic events with those who experienced them.

    Pentagon 9/11 Memorial

    The Pentagon Memorial is designed so that the nation may remember and reflect on the events that occurred on September 11, 2001. The Memorial will be free and open to the public seven days a week. Groups and individuals are welcome in the Memorial each day, but guided tours are not offered; the Memorial is meant to be experienced on a more personal level.

    Flight 93 National Memorial

    Flight 93 National Memorial has a place on the nation's honor roll of iconic places which includes Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor. Why is this ground so special? Why is this story so important? What began as an ordinary morning ended as a historic day when a common field in Pennsylvania was forever changed. Discover a story of courage, action, and honor.


    Lesson Idea: Creating Your Own Memorial to the September 11 Attacks

    For years, Facing History and Ourselves has helped teachers design memorials projects. After establishing an understanding of the potential power of memorials and monuments, teachers and students construct their own personal monuments or memorials. In many cases, these projects are guided by a series of questions including:

    • What would you like people to feel or think about when they visit the monument that you are designing?
    • Who is it built for? Where would you want it to be constructed? Who will be the audience?
    • What message will it convey? What point of view will it assume?
    • How can your monument be most effective in connecting the public to the point in the past that you have chosen to remember?


    Facing History’s Educator Workshop: How to Talk with Students about 9/11, Ten Years Later

    This summer, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, Facing History offered a special workshop to New York City area educators. Facing History Senior Program Associate Tracy Garrison-Feinberg told an interviewer: “This event shaped the 21st century, and is to continuing to shape it. It’s is a crucial part of who we have become.”

    Additional Resources

    From Newsday: Teachers: 9/11 'our history, generation'

  • Pope Warns Against Antisemitism in New Book
    March 29, 2011

    Pope Benedict XVI, the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, has taken an important step in recent months to combat antisemitism. He is publishing a new book in which he devotes extensive theological argument to making the case that there is no basis in Christian scripture for blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ, defusing a long-held source of religious bitterness.

    For centuries, some Christians used parts of the New Testament to blame all Jews for the death of Christ, and to justify the persecution of Jews. Beginning in the 1960s, the Catholic Church officially abandoned this belief.

    But now, a reporter writes, Benedict goes further in an effort to correct this wrong:

    The Catholic Church issued its most authoritative teaching on the issue in its 1965 Second Vatican Council document “Nostra Aetate,” which revolutionized the church’s relations with Jews by saying Christ’s death could not be attributed to Jews as a whole at the time or today.

    Benedict comes to the same conclusion, but he explains how with a thorough, Gospel-by-Gospel analysis that leaves little doubt that he deeply and personally believes it to be the case.

    The book, Jesus of Nazareth II, is the second installment to Benedict’s 2007 Jesus of Nazareth, which described the early years of Christ’s life and teachings. The new book, set to be released in March, concerns the final part of Christ’s life, his death, and resurrection.

    “Holocaust survivors know only too well how the centuries-long charge of ’Christ killer’ against the Jews created a poisonous climate of hate that was the foundation of anti-Semitic persecution whose ultimate expression was realized in the Holocaust,” said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants. The pope’s book, he said, not only confirms church teaching refuting the deicide charge “but seals it for a new generation of Catholics.”


    Discussion Questions:

    • Who is responsible for speaking out against antisemitism and other forms of racism? What are the consequences of a strong stand? What are the consequences of silence? What might the consequences be of the Pope’s stand?
    • What power do words have to turn neighbor against neighbor? When hateful words have been spoken, what can individuals, groups, and leaders do to mitigate their effects?

    Related Facing History Resources

    Theme - Antisemitism

    Video: Father Robert Bullock
    Father Robert W. Bullock, a founding leader of Facing History and Ourselves, was dedicated to building bridges between the Catholic and Jewish communities. As a scholar, he delved into the Holocaust and the roots of Christian antisemitism.

    External Link

    Pope exonerates Jews for Jesus’ death in new book, The Patriot Ledger, March 2, 2011

  • The Implicit Association Test
    December 15, 2010

    The work of psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, focuses on unconscious biases and their social consequences. Banaji heads the Project Implicit research group at Harvard and helps to maintain an online test—the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—which is designed to make people more aware of their unconscious biases. Click here to take the IAT.