People who remember Sept. 11, 2001, remember where they were when they heard first one plane, then two, hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, then the attack on the Pentagon, then the plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They remember how they learned about it, what they felt, who they called, and if they lost someone, all the loss that followed. Maybe, after 20 years of retelling and 20 years of war, in the midst of a pandemic and pitted polarization, those memories drift a bit out of focus.
The front pages that ran on Sept. 12, 2001, don’t have the rounded edges of recollections. Instead, they show a country reeling from attack and preparing to strike back. Here are 20 of them, mostly from the United States, with one from Canada and one from the United Kingdom, via newspapers.com. Through Wayback Machine, you can also see the front page collection Poynter published 20 years ago.
