American Catholicism and the Cantor Fitzgerald Employees Who Lost Their Lives on 9/11
FAIN: FZ-261493-18
Julie Elizabeth Byrne
Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY 11549-1000)
Writing an account of five men killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, focused on their shared cultural and religious background.
On September 11, 2001, financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 of its 960 New York employees, the highest number of casualties of any single institution. Its workers were largely young men from the suburbs of Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and they were mostly Catholic. In this book I put the story of 9/11 in an even larger frame of multigenerational U.S. love and loss, told through the lives of the the Cantor Fitzgerald men and those who mourned them. It is a local story of Catholic families whose suburban addresses came with profound shifts in class, race, gender, political views, and religious practice. It is also a story as national as the U.S. love affair between religion and business and as international as global terrorism. Exploring the lives of “just regular guys” who became national martyrs—and the continued hopes and doubts of family who loved them—promises new insight for all Americans wanting to understand ourselves and our country in this millennium.