SEPT. 11 Creation of memorials at sites of attacks gains a new urgency

A plan for a grand memorial to the victims of Flight 93 is being carried out.
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (AP) -- Unlike last year's extensive ceremonies, the second anniversary of the crash of Flight 93 on Thursday is expected to be small: bells tolling at the time of the crash, a modest event involving a Cabinet secretary.
Yet grander plans are under way -- a vast, national memorial for the 40 men and women who fought against their hijackers. Investigators believe hijackers may have been planning to crash the airliner into a target in Washington, D.C.
In what historians say is an increasingly common phenomenon, there was a large push for a memorial, even as ramifications of what happened that day continue to unfold.
A year ago, President Bush signed legislation to create a memorial that may cover as much as 21/2 miles of undulating land in rural southwest Pennsylvania, roughly following the path of the doomed airliner.
Interior Secretary Gail Norton will arrive at the crash site Thursday to swear in 14 federal advisory commissioners who have been asked to submit a design to Congress by 2005.
The drive to memorialize tragedies that historians would consider current events has become more urgent in recent years.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial was authorized slightly more than two years after the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people. The Flight 93 memorial was authorized in half that time.
Increasingly, memorials are as much, if not more, about protesting violence than they are about history.
"It's a revolt against the anonymity of mass death in our time," said Edward Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who has written five books on memorials and sacred ground. "Sadly, they have become notoriously unstable. Who would have thought in 1996 that Oklahoma City would be overshadowed by the events of 9-11?"
A powerful draw
Despite the isolation of the field some 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh where Flight 93 crashed, it has proven a powerful draw, with about 70,000 people arriving since late May of this year to visit a temporary memorial there, said Joanne Hanley, superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial.
Planning a permanent memorial to the victims, however, is a challenge to people who try to look at events over the long scope of history.
"You look at some of the battlefield sites like Gettysburg, which happened well over a century ago and we're still in very heated debates about what it all meant and who did what," said Kenneth Foote, author of "Shadowed Ground: America's Landscape of Tragedy and Violence."
Gettysburg was authorized as a national military park 32 years after the battle. Foote, a professor at University of Colorado-Boulder, says it's hard to say what the Sept. 11 attacks will mean to us decades from now.
Personal meaning
Of course, it's not only historians who are involved. At the Flight 93 crash site -- like that at Oklahoma City -- survivors and the families of victims play a large role in planning the memorial.
Despite the personal and painful emotions, Oklahoma City survivors chose to include photos and information about Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the men charged with delivering and detonating the bomb that killed their loved ones.
They were among the most adamant about wanting the memorial to be a place where visitors learn of terrorism's roots and effects, said Kari Watkins, executive director of the memorial.
"Did they like it? No," Watkins said. "But the story of what happened is told."