Meredith Lair, associate professor of history at George Mason University, discusses how the passage of time is changing the way Americans remember 9/11. As a growing number of young people have no personal memory of the events of 2001, educators and those responsible for commemoration face new challenges in telling the story and preserving its cultural and emotional significance.
Professor Lair’s work examines warfare and its relationship to American society and culture, with particular emphasis on how knowledge and memories of the past are constructed and disseminated over time. She is the author of Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War, which examines the non-combat experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam. Her current projects examine Vietnam War soldier photography and legacies of the Vietnam War, in particular how ideas about veteranhood have been constructed and changed over time. Professor Lair’s teaches courses on historical methods, war and American society, and the Vietnam War in the Department of History & Art History.
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