The numbers tell one story of the 9/11 terror attacks, in comparison with other major losses in U.S. history:

• 2,400 died Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on a “date which will live in infamy.”

• 3,600 died Sept. 17, 1862, in the Battle of Antietam, the Civil War clash that remains the bloodiest one-day battle in U.S. history.

• Nearly 3,000 people died Sept. 11, 2001, as three hijacked airliners hit their targets — each tower of World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. — and a fourth crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania.

The numbers tell only part of the story.

“The people who died on 9/11 weren’t members of the armed forces,” says Jonathan Earle, an associate professor of history at Kansas University. “They were civilians. They were normal people. That places this in a category all its own as a terrible, terrible day in American history.”

He pauses to consider the context.

“We’ve had a lot of terrible days in our history,” he says, again pausing, “but people never signed up for that.”

Continued processing

As Americans pause today to remember that horrific day a decade ago, Earle and other historians, including teachers in the Lawrence school district, are looking back on the events to determine how they came about, what changes they have spurred, and where the resulting losses and adjustments might lead.

The efforts are very much works in progress and lead in many directions. Earle, for one, discusses the attacks and their effects in his undergraduate history class, “Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American History.”

Just as people maintain that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t assassinate President Kennedy, there are so-called “truthers” who believe that the United States either allowed or even caused the 9/11 attacks, Earle says. When horrible events occur, people search for answers — and find themselves reaching for even the most outrageous of explanations.

Americans and others worldwide continue to live with both the immediate effects and lasting impacts of 9/11, making it difficult to reach historic conclusions about the attacks. At least for now.

“Ten years from now I’m not even sure we’ll have a real handle on it,” Earle says. “It’s very visceral for a lot of people. We feel it with our guts, not our heads.”

Recent history lessons

Dustin Leochner recalls the visceral: That morning 10 years ago, sitting with his students in the eighth-grade pod at Southwest Junior High School, watching on TV as a jetliner flew into the second tower at the World Trade Center.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘We’re going to war … and when my students are of fighting age, it could potentially have an impact on them,'” Leochner says and, sure enough, two of his students who started that day learning about the American Revolution would join the Army and take up arms in the Middle East.

Now, as a teacher of Advanced Placement history at Free State High School, things already are different. He recently asked juniors in his class — they would have been 5 or 6 years old on 9/11 — about why the attacks happened.

“Out of my 120 kids, maybe two or three could really tell me the background — about Islamic fundamentalism, our presence in Saudi Arabia, how that irritates people,” Leochner says. “It was an eye-opener for me. … It reminded me of the necessity, that there’s a lot of recent history — of the past 10, 20, 30 years — that these kids need to understand because it has such a huge impact on what’s going on — economically, politically, socially.”

Among items to ponder: If not for 9/11, would the U.S. be fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? If not for the wars, would the U.S. government and society as a whole have been able to focus more on banking irregularities and the mortgage boom to prevent them from becoming economic problems?

And, looking forward, how will all of this affect matters in Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons and a destabilizing political environment?

“All this stuff is interconnected,” Leochner says. “That’s what history is: Events and people from the past, and the study of those events and people and how they’ve shaped the present.”

‘Still asking questions’

Valerie Schrag is focusing on the study of history, and the process of history, when considering any significant event with her AP history class at Lawrence High School.

The key: Asking questions, just as her history students had done 10 years ago today.

“The one that still stays with me,” she says, “was a student who looks at me, with a real questioning look in his eyes and his face: ‘Ms. Schrag? What was in those buildings?’

“That’s the basic question: Why?

“Finding your way through — trying to answer those very basic questions on that day — was what my task was. And my answer, to be honest, was, ‘I don’t know.’ That was the honest truth. I didn’t know what was happening. Nobody knew what was happening. What comes next? We didn’t know and, in many ways, we still don’t know.”

The process of documenting 9/11 history — finding the facts, formulating questions, then telling the story by assessing the meanings and implications of people or events — started that day, in her classroom, as Principal Dick Patterson announced news of the attacks to the school over the intercom.

Ten years later, the process continues.

“It’s a continuing, unfolding story,” Schrag says. “That’s the thing about history: It’s a changing story, and it’s unfolding each and every day, if you are willing to ask questions.

“We’re still asking questions.”