The events of September 11, 2001, have come to define the beginning of the 2000s, in both the United States and the world at large. While New York was not the only target of the attacks, the visibility of the World Trade Center and the enormous number of lives lost there have made the city the focal point of the world’s collective memory of that day. The World Trade Center had been considered a synecdoche for the city as a whole, often appearing in advertisements for media set in New York City. Pre-9/11 and post-9/11 media are often identifiable by the presence or absence of the twin towers, with some works using their presence or absence to indicate time period. This split between before and after 9/11 also gestures to the cultural implications of the attacks on the American psyche.

From a post-9/11 vantage point, the last years of the 20th century are often seen as a time of naive optimism. The Cold War had ended, Francis Fukuyama had declared “the end of history,” and it was widely assumed that capitalism and liberal democracy would rule unchallenged for the foreseeable future.