NCTC lecture marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

GAINESVILLE, Texas — North Central Texas College marked 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks with a lecture led by Professor Charles Adams, who walked a campus audience through what happened that morning and how it reshaped American life. The observance came on Friday, the anniversary of the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and aboard a hijacked jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. According to the Gainesville Daily Register, Adams opened his talk with his own account of the day, then widened the discussion to the changes that followed, from airport security and intelligence gathering to the wars that reshaped American foreign policy for a generation. The professor made a point of explaining where he was when the planes hit, aware that part of his audience was too young to remember the morning at all, and that some in the room had not yet been born. That generational gap has become a theme for educators teaching the attacks. For students born after 2001, the images of the towers falling, the weeks of rescue work at Ground Zero and the years of military deployments that followed are history lessons rather than memories. Patriot Day is observed each Sept. 11 by presidential proclamation, with flags flown at half-staff and moments of silence held across the country. North Central Texas College, based in Gainesville, hosts lectures and community programs throughout the year at its Cooke County campus and serves students across North Texas. The anniversary lecture was paired with coursework on modern American history, giving students a chance to connect the attacks to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to the security changes that followed.