Baldwin High School AP U.S. History Class Featured on Front Page of The Washington Post

While former presidents and survivors gathered to hear songs and speeches commemorating 9/11 on Friday, teens at Baldwin High School about 30 miles from Ground Zero leafed gently through a stack of old letters.

Many of the messages were handwritten on 25-year-old lined notebook paper. Some had been written in cursive, a script almost indecipherable to several of the readers, who are from a generation that learned how to write essays with a keyboard.

One of the letters said the air in the Long Island community smelled “acrid” after the planes struck. Another writer described wanting to vomit.

And another said he was worried about his mom.

“September 11th was one of the scariest days of my life because my mother worked in Manhattan at the time,” the boy wrote in 2002. “Later on that day, I heard from her and she was fine, but when she came home she had dust all over her, from when the buildings fell.”

In handwritten letters and drawings, former students offered first-person accounts of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York. The records felt and read differently than the primary sources that today’s students at Baldwin High School normally encounter. These were the memories, fears and fury expressed by people who were their age when the unthinkable happened.

“For the most part, I think that, as high school students, we see 9/11 as an event in a textbook or a piece of history,” said Ethan Manay, 15. “But they were experiencing it.”

In Baldwin, a middle-class suburb of New York City, everyone had some connection to the attacks. Students and teachers lost parents, relatives and friends.

But the students sitting in John Buglione’s AP U.S. History class on Friday don’t have those same ties. They weren’t alive. Some of their parents weren’t even living in the country.

Buglione was in his second year of teaching when two planes plowed into the World Trade Center. He remembers watching from the school’s windows as plumes of smoke reached into the sky in the distance; playing the local radio from his boom box and hearing a desperate plea for “anybody with medical experience” to come to Manhattan; getting called to work early on Sept. 12 to find out which of his students’ parents were still missing.

“Everybody knew at the time how big an event it was,” said Buglione, now in his 27th year of teaching at Baldwin.

He also knew that one day he would stare at a classroom full of teenagers who would have no recollection of how teachers at Baldwin lined up to donate blood or, in the weeks that followed, how silent students would get when a plane flew overhead.

So, each semester between fall 2001 and spring 2003, Buglione asked his students to write a letter about 9/11 to the future students of Baldwin.

“‘Hey guys, we’re studying history. You’re doing history,’” he remembers telling them.

Then he stowed the messages in his classroom’s closet for more than a decade.

Read the full story online in the Washington Post>>