For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins.

Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces. Trakr, a German shepherd from Canada, combed the wreckage for two days — then collapsed from smoke inhalation, exhaustion and burns. Riley, a 4-year-old golden retriever, searched deep into the debris fields and helped locate the bodies of several firefighters.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/is-911-a-day-or-is-it-an-era-411151">Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era?</a>

“We went there expecting to find hundreds of people trapped,” said Chris Selfridge, 54, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who was Riley’s handler. “But we didn’t find anybody alive.”

Though there were not many survivors to find amid the destruction, the devotion of the dogs to their work became an inspiring sight to emergency medical workers and to others who witnessed the urgent rescue effort. Now, as the 20th anniversary of the attacks approaches, those efforts are being memorialized in an exhibition opening Wednesday at the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog.

Titled “9/11 Remembered: Search &amp; Rescue Dogs,” the exhibition also looks beyond the parameters of 9/11 to recognize dogs who worked at other disasters as well, not just in the United States, but around the world. The show will also include several pieces from the DOGNY project, an art initiative that features life-size sculptures of German shepherds. Roughly 100 of them were placed around New York after the attacks.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-911-changed-air-travel-more-security-less-privacy-411141">How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy</a>

“I hope this can be a little more uplifting,” Alan Fausel, the museum’s executive director, said. “We also showcase some of the brighter sides and positive outcomes: Rex of White Way rescued a whole train of people stuck in the Sierra Nevadas in the ’50s, and we’ll talk about St. Bernards such as Barry, a very famous St. Bernard in the St. Bernard hospice in Switzerland who rescued avalanche victims.”

The display follows up on an ongoing temporary exhibition at the 9/11 Memorial &amp; Museum in lower Manhattan, “K-9 Courage,” which opened in January 2020, but was hardly seen because of the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">pandemic</a>. That exhibit, which runs into spring 2022, features photographer Charlotte Dumas’ portraits of 15 of the dogs who aided in recovery efforts at ground zero, taken for the 10-year anniversary in 2011, alongside photos of them working in the wreckage.

“You look into their eyes in their old age and can, with the help of the documentary photographs, imagine what their eyes had seen,” Alice M. Greenwald, the chief executive and president of the museum, said. “But you also know that they’ve lived lives of service and surely, there is satisfaction in that — for dogs and human beings, alike.”

Some 2,753 people were killed when the terrorist group al-Qaida hijacked two planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center’s towers, causing them both to collapse in the span of 102 minutes.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/freedom-tower-the-skyscraper-symbolising-new-yorks-resilience-411055">'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience</a>

As an acrid dust cloud enveloped lower Manhattan and a nation mourned, hundreds of search and rescue teams from around the country descended on ground zero to join the search for survivors, with the first dogs, from the NYPD’s K-9 urban search and rescue team, arriving at the South Tower just 15 minutes after its collapse.

The teams worked 12-hour days for an average of 10 days straight.

The New York Police Department has reported that though survivors were found in the rubble, none of those was the direct result of a dog’s discovery. Several people, though, have credited Trackr, a retired police dog, with having played a role in one rescue. His handler, a Canadian policeman who drove down from Nova Scotia, was suspended from his job for leaving without permission when his department saw him on television aiding the rescue efforts. (Jane Goodall later presented him with a humanitarian service award).

Dr. Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia who looked after the dogs at ground zero, said the that, for the most part,&nbsp;the dogs’ injuries were only “very minor” — cuts and scrapes on their paw pads, legs and bellies, mainly, as well as fatigue and heat exhaustion. The bigger challenge, she said, was the frustration of searching for hours and not finding anyone. When the dogs began to get discouraged and lose their motivation to search, handlers had to stage “mock finds” so the dogs could feel successful.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twenty-years-on-pandemic-gives-911-conspiracists-fresh-impetus-411061">Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus</a>

“When they train, they don’t search for hours without finding anybody,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “You need to remind the dogs every so often that they do get to win.”

Bretagne (pronounced Brittany), a golden retriever who was then 2 years old, arrived the week after the attacks and spent 10 days searching for survivors. She slept in a kennel at the Javits Center alongside her handler, Denise Corliss, an electrical engineer from Texas who had traveled to the city with Texas Task Force 1, one of the 28 teams that form the FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue System.

Corliss, 56, said Bretagne, who died in 2016, was the last known living service dog to have been employed by FEMA at ground zero. She brought comfort to rescuers and firefighters, who would approach the dog and pet her. Soon, they’d open up to Corliss, sharing personal stories of the missing friends and colleagues they were searching for.

“A gentleman came up and started petting Bretagne and said, ‘You know, I don’t really like dogs,’” she said. “Which was a surprising statement considering he was kneeling down to pet her. I said ‘Oh?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, my best friend loved dogs; he had a golden retriever himself. My best friend is somewhere out there,’ and he pointed to the pile. It was a tie back to his missing friend.”

And that, Fausel said, is what the Museum of the Dog hopes to capture in its new exhibition.

“The search and rescue dogs didn’t rescue any people from the pile,” he said. “But I think they somewhat rescued the people who were searching.”

For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins. Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces.

For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smouldering ruins. Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces. Trakr, a German shepherd from Canada, combed the wreckage for two days — then collapsed from smoke inhalation, exhaustion and burns. Riley, a 4-year-old golden retriever, searched deep into the debris fields and helped locate the bodies of several firefighters. Also read | Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era? “We went there expecting to find hundreds of people trapped,” said Chris Selfridge, 54, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who was Riley’s handler. “But we didn’t find anybody alive.” Though there were not many survivors to find amid the destruction, the devotion of the dogs to their work became an inspiring sight to emergency medical workers and to others who witnessed the urgent rescue effort. Now, as the 20th anniversary of the attacks approaches, those efforts are being memorialized in an exhibition opening Wednesday at the American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog. Titled “9/11 Remembered: Search & Rescue Dogs,” the exhibition also looks beyond the parameters of 9/11 to recognize dogs who worked at other disasters as well, not just in the United States, but around the world. The show will also include several pieces from the DOGNY project, an art initiative that features life-size sculptures of German shepherds. Roughly 100 of them were placed around New York after the attacks. Also read | How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy “I hope this can be a little more uplifting,” Alan Fausel, the museum’s executive director, said. “We also showcase some of the brighter sides and positive outcomes: Rex of White Way rescued a whole train of people stuck in the Sierra Nevadas in the ’50s, and we’ll talk about St. Bernards such as Barry, a very famous St. Bernard in the St. Bernard hospice in Switzerland who rescued avalanche victims.” The display follows up on an ongoing temporary exhibition at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan, “K-9 Courage,” which opened in January 2020, but was hardly seen because of the pandemic. That exhibit, which runs into spring 2022, features photographer Charlotte Dumas’ portraits of 15 of the dogs who aided in recovery efforts at ground zero, taken for the 10-year anniversary in 2011, alongside photos of them working in the wreckage. “You look into their eyes in their old age and can, with the help of the documentary photographs, imagine what their eyes had seen,” Alice M. Greenwald, the chief executive and president of the museum, said. “But you also know that they’ve lived lives of service and surely, there is satisfaction in that — for dogs and human beings, alike.” Some 2,753 people were killed when the terrorist group al-Qaida hijacked two planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center’s towers, causing them both to collapse in the span of 102 minutes. Also read | 'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience As an acrid dust cloud enveloped lower Manhattan and a nation mourned, hundreds of search and rescue teams from around the country descended on ground zero to join the search for survivors, with the first dogs, from the NYPD’s K-9 urban search and rescue team, arriving at the South Tower just 15 minutes after its collapse. The teams worked 12-hour days for an average of 10 days straight. The New York Police Department has reported that though survivors were found in the rubble, none of those was the direct result of a dog’s discovery. Several people, though, have credited Trackr, a retired police dog, with having played a role in one rescue. His handler, a Canadian policeman who drove down from Nova Scotia, was suspended from his job for leaving without permission when his department saw him on television aiding the rescue efforts. (Jane Goodall later presented him with a humanitarian service award). Dr. Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia who looked after the dogs at ground zero, said the that, for the most part, the dogs’ injuries were only “very minor” — cuts and scrapes on their paw pads, legs and bellies, mainly, as well as fatigue and heat exhaustion. The bigger challenge, she said, was the frustration of searching for hours and not finding anyone. When the dogs began to get discouraged and lose their motivation to search, handlers had to stage “mock finds” so the dogs could feel successful. Also read | Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus “When they train, they don’t search for hours without finding anybody,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “You need to remind the dogs every so often that they do get to win.” Bretagne (pronounced Brittany), a golden retriever who was then 2 years old, arrived the week after the attacks and spent 10 days searching for survivors. She slept in a kennel at the Javits Center alongside her handler, Denise Corliss, an electrical engineer from Texas who had traveled to the city with Texas Task Force 1, one of the 28 teams that form the FEMA National Urban Search and Rescue System. Corliss, 56, said Bretagne, who died in 2016, was the last known living service dog to have been employed by FEMA at ground zero. She brought comfort to rescuers and firefighters, who would approach the dog and pet her. Soon, they’d open up to Corliss, sharing personal stories of the missing friends and colleagues they were searching for. “A gentleman came up and started petting Bretagne and said, ‘You know, I don’t really like dogs,’” she said. “Which was a surprising statement considering he was kneeling down to pet her. I said ‘Oh?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, my best friend loved dogs; he had a golden retriever himself. My best friend is somewhere out there,’ and he pointed to the pile. It was a tie back to his missing friend.” And that, Fausel said, is what the Museum of the Dog hopes to capture in its new exhibition. “The search and rescue dogs didn’t rescue any people from the pile,” he said. “But I think they somewhat rescued the people who were searching.”

The dogs of 9/11: Their failed searches for life helped sustain it

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage.

A clarification: I actually took those descriptions from this newspaper’s review programming for the 10th anniversary. But they apply just as well this year, for the 20th.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-911-changed-air-travel-more-security-less-privacy-411141">How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy</a>

In documentary after documentary, on cable, streaming and broadcast, you can hear, over and over, the air traffic-control distress calls. You can see, again and again, the stunning footage of an airliner slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center, captured by a documentary filmmaker accompanying firefighters on a routine call. You can be reminded, time after heartbreaking time, what a beautiful, blue-sky September morning it was.

The interview subjects have aged. Time has passed. The children who fled schools or lost parents that morning are now grown adults. (Two documentaries, on the History Channel and Discovery+, focus on them.) But the story, as told, is mostly the same.

Twenty years later, is there anything still to say about Sept. 11? Of course; it would be unimaginable to simply ignore it. A tougher question is: Is there anything&nbsp;more&nbsp;to say than there was five, 10, 15 years ago?

There is. But actually saying it can be riskier.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/freedom-tower-the-skyscraper-symbolising-new-yorks-resilience-411055">'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience</a>

TV’s treatment of Sept. 11 has changed over the years, in bits and pieces. The adrenaline rush of “24” gave way to the moral grayscale of “Homeland.” MSNBC finally ended its grim tradition of replaying the live coverage of the attacks. But the general approach of the memorial specials, tightly focused on honouring the loss and sacrifice of one discrete day, has kept a kind of ritual familiarity.

For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — “Never forget” — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed.

But is Sept. 11 simply a day, or is it an era? Was it the beginning of something or a continuation? You can divide most of the anniversary specials between those that focus closely on the day that the towers fell and those that pull back, way back, to look at what emerged from the dust.

There are plenty of the former kind. On National Geographic, the four-part series “9/11: One Day in America” reassembles in granular detail the horrific experience of that morning. (It’s streaming on Hulu — all the programs mentioned here are currently streaming unless otherwise noted.) A special episode of “60 Minutes,” premiering Sept. 12, revisits the stories of firefighters who survived the catastrophe, and those who didn’t.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twenty-years-on-pandemic-gives-911-conspiracists-fresh-impetus-411061">Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus</a>

Apple TV+’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” interviews George W. Bush and former members of his staff about the decisions and chaos of that morning, with scant reference to any decisions — say, the invasion of Iraq — that followed. And the seven hours of new 9/11 programming on the History Channel include “9/11: Four Flights,” about the aircraft that crashed into the towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, and “9/11: I Was There,” based on amateur video (both premiere on Sept. 11).

These remember-the-day documentaries tend to be heartfelt and reverent; they are often meticulously researched and assembled. (I cannot speak for “Long Island Medium: In Memory of 9/11,” the TLC special, premiering Thursday, that promises to bring families messages from the spirits of their lost loved ones.) They have the benefit of two decades of fact-finding. But for years now, it has been hard for anything to match the immediacy and urgency of “9/11,” the film by Gédéon and Jules Naudet — the brothers whose intended firefighter documentary produced that famous tower-impact shot — which aired on CBS in 2002. (CNN will re-air it on Sunday.)

Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day, of course, avoids getting ensnared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on. It’s safer, in the way that it’s safer to teach the Civil War or Jim Crow as horrors of the past instead of events on a continuum that reaches into the present.

The other approach is to decide that 20 years, a full generation, is long enough to treat the terror attacks as part of a larger historical era.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/911-attacks-us-president-moves-to-declassify-documents-as-20th-anniversary-approaches-410579">9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches</a>

Sept. 11 is not only in the past, as you can see in the bloody news from Afghanistan. For viewers who want to unpack how the attacks led to two decades of military entanglements, there’s Netflix’s five-part “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror,” which looks unsparingly at the intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and the mission creep through multiple administrations. Enlighteningly, it includes the voices of Afghan leaders and civilians. Sept. 11, as an epoch, meant upheaval for more than one nation.

But the history of Sept. 11 goes far beyond war and foreign policy. It affected domestic politics, domestic enmities and even American culture.

And two of the anniversary’s most striking documentaries present Sept. 11 as an event that struck at America’s democracy and even its soul.

The “Frontline” special “America After 9/11,” premiering Tuesday on PBS, is driven by a striking video juxtaposition. First, on the Capitol steps the day of the attacks, a chorus of members of Congress, Republican and Democratic, senators and representatives, join to sing “God Bless America.” Two decades later, on the same site, a mob besieges Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/blame-for-afghanistan-lies-on-president-biden-says-911-era-nypd-commissioner-410532">Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner&nbsp;</a>

It’s a provocative connection, but filmmaker Michael Kirk lays it out economically: The attacks set off a chain of action and changes — military quagmires, suspicion and racism at home, the loss of trust in institutions — that demagogues used to undermine democracy, and that fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s goal of dividing and weakening America.

From the beginning, the special argues, America’s response was driven by paradox: the moral rhetoric of Bush and the strategies of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that America would need to work with “the dark side” to survive.

The dark side won, “America After 9/11” argues. It won when specious claims of weapons of mass destruction rationalized war in Iraq; when images of torture emerged from Abu Ghraib prison; when illustrations of Barack Obama as bin Laden circulated; when the media fed hysteria about terror threats; and when the 2016 election was won by a candidate who said, “I think Islam hates us” and used similar rhetoric for people he labelled domestic enemies.

In this light, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with its racist language and its fantasy of reclaiming America from a shadowy existential threat — was, says former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, “the logical endpoint” of the 9/11 era.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/former-commissioner-of-new-york-city-police-dept-bernard-kerik-speaks-on-911-attacks-410624/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

But the most sweeping — and, I expect, ultimately the most memorable — of this year’s documentaries is Spike Lee’s elegiac, messy and feisty “NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½,” airing in four parts on HBO.

As the title suggests, “Epicenters” is only partly about 9/11, and it makes a strong case that the 9/11 era can only be captured with the widest lens. It works backwards, starting from the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">COVID-19 pandemic</a> and moving — through Black Lives Matter, the 2016 and 2020 elections and more — to its starting point. In Lee’s telling, Sept. 11 is not just a matter of terrorism, but also the opening act to decades of calamity and uproar.

If it seems like a stretch, “Epicenters” soon makes it difficult to see the subject otherwise, drawing connection after connection across the years. There is Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor” in the days after the towers fell, spouting election-hoax fan fiction at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. There is the rash of Islamophobic attacks after Sept. 11, echoing in the xenophobia of the Trump era. There are emergency medical workers suffering from 9/11-related illnesses that loom as preexisting conditions during the pandemic.

Sept. 11, in Lee’s telling, is itself a preexisting condition. It is not a one-time injury but a chronic affliction, and other, pre-preexisting conditions express themselves through it as well. New York came back from it, and, “Epicenters” insists, it will come back from COVID. But in his crowning image, Lee likens that comeback to Marlon Brando’s bloodied stagger at the end of “On the Waterfront.” Each blow leaves a mark.

“Epicenters” uses clips from a lot of films to evoke the city, from “On the Town” to the 1976 remake of “King Kong” to Lee’s own work. Lee’s memory of New York, like many people’s, is a blend of lived experience and fantasy. And sometimes the exaggerated language of film is the only thing that can capture larger-than-life experience; as the series notes, people describe Sept. 11, over and over, as being “like a movie.”

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-spike-lee-re-edits-9-11-documentary-featuring-conspiracy-theorists-408396">Spike Lee re-edits 9-11 documentary featuring conspiracy theorists</a>

Lee’s interviews — with hundreds of people, from high elected officials to heavy-equipment operators at ground zero — are warm, emotional, sometimes sparring. He ribs every Boston Red Sox fan he talks to; when his subjects need time to collect themselves, he lets the moments play out. For politicians, he lets the raspberries fly freely (the captions refer to Donald Trump, in the words of the rapper Busta Rhymes, as “President Agent Orange”).

One could argue over which director is most essentially New York. But Lee’s passionate heckler’s breed of New York-ness may be the best suited to this subject. He is loving and critical, impulses that New Yorkers know as synonyms. And his focus on diversity and race helps him find less-heard voices in a much-told story, like those of the Vulcan Society for Black firefighters, or of the Black flight attendant who guiltily recalls “racially profiling” a Saudi passenger after Sept. 11.

Unfortunately, “Epicenters” has made the most news for what you won’t see in it: an extended, bizarre section in the original final episode that gave credence to the conspiracists who theorize that the towers were brought down by a controlled explosion. Lee snipped the entire section, and despite the blunt edit, the shorter final cut, which premieres on Sept. 11, actually flows better.

I could imagine a version of “Epicenters” that still covered the conspiracy theories, not to legitimize them, but as an example of the paranoia that thrives in a country lacking social trust — which Lee rightly deplores when it comes to anti-vaccine theories and the election hoaxes that drove some of the Capitol assailants.

There’s a sobering meta-lesson in the fact that the most artful of this season’s Sept. 11 documentaries became an example of one of the very problems it diagnosed. But at least the resolution shows that criticism can make a difference, and that it’s not too late to look at history seriously and make a change.

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage.

The TV specials for the Sept. 11 anniversary offer any number of ways to return to hell. There are wrenching interviews with survivors and with those whose loved ones died; uplifting stories of rescues and agonizing stories of those who perished in the attempt; footage of the conflagration, chaos and shock, as seen on morning newscasts and in the ash-blanketed streets; images of the first responders and volunteers digging through wreckage. A clarification: I actually took those descriptions from this newspaper’s review programming for the 10th anniversary. But they apply just as well this year, for the 20th. Also read | How 9/11 changed air travel: More security, less privacy In documentary after documentary, on cable, streaming and broadcast, you can hear, over and over, the air traffic-control distress calls. You can see, again and again, the stunning footage of an airliner slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center, captured by a documentary filmmaker accompanying firefighters on a routine call. You can be reminded, time after heartbreaking time, what a beautiful, blue-sky September morning it was. The interview subjects have aged. Time has passed. The children who fled schools or lost parents that morning are now grown adults. (Two documentaries, on the History Channel and Discovery+, focus on them.) But the story, as told, is mostly the same. Twenty years later, is there anything still to say about Sept. 11? Of course; it would be unimaginable to simply ignore it. A tougher question is: Is there anything more to say than there was five, 10, 15 years ago? There is. But actually saying it can be riskier. Also read | 'Freedom Tower' - the skyscraper symbolising New York's resilience TV’s treatment of Sept. 11 has changed over the years, in bits and pieces. The adrenaline rush of “24” gave way to the moral grayscale of “Homeland.” MSNBC finally ended its grim tradition of replaying the live coverage of the attacks. But the general approach of the memorial specials, tightly focused on honouring the loss and sacrifice of one discrete day, has kept a kind of ritual familiarity. For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — “Never forget” — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed. But is Sept. 11 simply a day, or is it an era? Was it the beginning of something or a continuation? You can divide most of the anniversary specials between those that focus closely on the day that the towers fell and those that pull back, way back, to look at what emerged from the dust. There are plenty of the former kind. On National Geographic, the four-part series “9/11: One Day in America” reassembles in granular detail the horrific experience of that morning. (It’s streaming on Hulu — all the programs mentioned here are currently streaming unless otherwise noted.) A special episode of “60 Minutes,” premiering Sept. 12, revisits the stories of firefighters who survived the catastrophe, and those who didn’t. Also read | Twenty years on, pandemic gives 9/11 conspiracists fresh impetus Apple TV+’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room” interviews George W. Bush and former members of his staff about the decisions and chaos of that morning, with scant reference to any decisions — say, the invasion of Iraq — that followed. And the seven hours of new 9/11 programming on the History Channel include “9/11: Four Flights,” about the aircraft that crashed into the towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, and “9/11: I Was There,” based on amateur video (both premiere on Sept. 11). These remember-the-day documentaries tend to be heartfelt and reverent; they are often meticulously researched and assembled. (I cannot speak for “Long Island Medium: In Memory of 9/11,” the TLC special, premiering Thursday, that promises to bring families messages from the spirits of their lost loved ones.) They have the benefit of two decades of fact-finding. But for years now, it has been hard for anything to match the immediacy and urgency of “9/11,” the film by Gédéon and Jules Naudet — the brothers whose intended firefighter documentary produced that famous tower-impact shot — which aired on CBS in 2002. (CNN will re-air it on Sunday.) Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day, of course, avoids getting ensnared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on. It’s safer, in the way that it’s safer to teach the Civil War or Jim Crow as horrors of the past instead of events on a continuum that reaches into the present. The other approach is to decide that 20 years, a full generation, is long enough to treat the terror attacks as part of a larger historical era. Also read | 9/11 attacks: US president moves to declassify documents as 20th anniversary approaches Sept. 11 is not only in the past, as you can see in the bloody news from Afghanistan. For viewers who want to unpack how the attacks led to two decades of military entanglements, there’s Netflix’s five-part “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror,” which looks unsparingly at the intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and the mission creep through multiple administrations. Enlighteningly, it includes the voices of Afghan leaders and civilians. Sept. 11, as an epoch, meant upheaval for more than one nation. But the history of Sept. 11 goes far beyond war and foreign policy. It affected domestic politics, domestic enmities and even American culture. And two of the anniversary’s most striking documentaries present Sept. 11 as an event that struck at America’s democracy and even its soul. The “Frontline” special “America After 9/11,” premiering Tuesday on PBS, is driven by a striking video juxtaposition. First, on the Capitol steps the day of the attacks, a chorus of members of Congress, Republican and Democratic, senators and representatives, join to sing “God Bless America.” Two decades later, on the same site, a mob besieges Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. Also read | Exclusive: Blame for Afghanistan 'lies on President Biden', says 9/11-era NYPD commissioner It’s a provocative connection, but filmmaker Michael Kirk lays it out economically: The attacks set off a chain of action and changes — military quagmires, suspicion and racism at home, the loss of trust in institutions — that demagogues used to undermine democracy, and that fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s goal of dividing and weakening America. From the beginning, the special argues, America’s response was driven by paradox: the moral rhetoric of Bush and the strategies of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that America would need to work with “the dark side” to survive. The dark side won, “America After 9/11” argues. It won when specious claims of weapons of mass destruction rationalized war in Iraq; when images of torture emerged from Abu Ghraib prison; when illustrations of Barack Obama as bin Laden circulated; when the media fed hysteria about terror threats; and when the 2016 election was won by a candidate who said, “I think Islam hates us” and used similar rhetoric for people he labelled domestic enemies. In this light, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with its racist language and its fantasy of reclaiming America from a shadowy existential threat — was, says former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, “the logical endpoint” of the 9/11 era. But the most sweeping — and, I expect, ultimately the most memorable — of this year’s documentaries is Spike Lee’s elegiac, messy and feisty “NYC Epicenters: 9/11-2021½,” airing in four parts on HBO. As the title suggests, “Epicenters” is only partly about 9/11, and it makes a strong case that the 9/11 era can only be captured with the widest lens. It works backwards, starting from the COVID-19 pandemic and moving — through Black Lives Matter, the 2016 and 2020 elections and more — to its starting point. In Lee’s telling, Sept. 11 is not just a matter of terrorism, but also the opening act to decades of calamity and uproar. If it seems like a stretch, “Epicenters” soon makes it difficult to see the subject otherwise, drawing connection after connection across the years. There is Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor” in the days after the towers fell, spouting election-hoax fan fiction at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. There is the rash of Islamophobic attacks after Sept. 11, echoing in the xenophobia of the Trump era. There are emergency medical workers suffering from 9/11-related illnesses that loom as preexisting conditions during the pandemic. Sept. 11, in Lee’s telling, is itself a preexisting condition. It is not a one-time injury but a chronic affliction, and other, pre-preexisting conditions express themselves through it as well. New York came back from it, and, “Epicenters” insists, it will come back from COVID. But in his crowning image, Lee likens that comeback to Marlon Brando’s bloodied stagger at the end of “On the Waterfront.” Each blow leaves a mark. “Epicenters” uses clips from a lot of films to evoke the city, from “On the Town” to the 1976 remake of “King Kong” to Lee’s own work. Lee’s memory of New York, like many people’s, is a blend of lived experience and fantasy. And sometimes the exaggerated language of film is the only thing that can capture larger-than-life experience; as the series notes, people describe Sept. 11, over and over, as being “like a movie.” Also read | Spike Lee re-edits 9-11 documentary featuring conspiracy theorists Lee’s interviews — with hundreds of people, from high elected officials to heavy-equipment operators at ground zero — are warm, emotional, sometimes sparring. He ribs every Boston Red Sox fan he talks to; when his subjects need time to collect themselves, he lets the moments play out. For politicians, he lets the raspberries fly freely (the captions refer to Donald Trump, in the words of the rapper Busta Rhymes, as “President Agent Orange”). One could argue over which director is most essentially New York. But Lee’s passionate heckler’s breed of New York-ness may be the best suited to this subject. He is loving and critical, impulses that New Yorkers know as synonyms. And his focus on diversity and race helps him find less-heard voices in a much-told story, like those of the Vulcan Society for Black firefighters, or of the Black flight attendant who guiltily recalls “racially profiling” a Saudi passenger after Sept. 11. Unfortunately, “Epicenters” has made the most news for what you won’t see in it: an extended, bizarre section in the original final episode that gave credence to the conspiracists who theorize that the towers were brought down by a controlled explosion. Lee snipped the entire section, and despite the blunt edit, the shorter final cut, which premieres on Sept. 11, actually flows better. I could imagine a version of “Epicenters” that still covered the conspiracy theories, not to legitimize them, but as an example of the paranoia that thrives in a country lacking social trust — which Lee rightly deplores when it comes to anti-vaccine theories and the election hoaxes that drove some of the Capitol assailants. There’s a sobering meta-lesson in the fact that the most artful of this season’s Sept. 11 documentaries became an example of one of the very problems it diagnosed. But at least the resolution shows that criticism can make a difference, and that it’s not too late to look at history seriously and make a change.

Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era?

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The dogs of 9/11: Their failed searches for life helped sustain it

Is 9/11 a day, or is it an Era?