For much of the past 25 years, each anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has arrived with signs and stickers reminding people to “never forget.”

I have always felt unsure about what those words mean. For those of us who were alive in 2001, forgetting the day itself is almost impossible.

I remember the shock and fear, the replays of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, and the moment the second tower fell. I remember seeing on television the missing-person photographs that covered New York and the awful recognition that very few of those people were likely to be found alive. I remember the bravery of the New York firefighters and police.

My college students have no such memories or feelings. Most were born years after Sept. 11, 2001.

They encounter what happened through photographs, documentaries, memorials, classroom lessons and stories told by people who were alive on that day. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates that about 100 million Americans have been born since the attacks.

The shift is ordinary and still somehow startling. An event that once felt like it had split time into a permanent before and after is fading into history itself.

In my work as a professor of politics and public affairs, I pay close attention to the stories Americans tell about their past and the ways those stories shape civic identity in the present. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is especially interesting to me because it marks a moment when an event once experienced as immediate and world-changing is increasingly being carried forward through memory, ritual and interpretation.

Understanding history includes forgetting

Scholars of collective memory, also called public memory, have long argued that societies do not remember the past simply by preserving it.

Public memory describes how collective meaning gets made and remade through stories, institutions, rituals and political arguments. For example, the Department........

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