9/11 TRIBUTE BOOK OPENS PRE-ORDERS TODAY: ‘AMERICA’S PROVIDENCE’ TRACES THE TWIN TOWERS BACK TO A 1789 PRAYER

Forty years of photographs from both sides of the Hudson anchor a 25th-anniversary account that begins two centuries before the towers fell

WESTFIELD, NJ, UNITED STATES, September 1, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Dave Rossi was standing on the Jersey City waterfront with his camera on September 11, 2001, watching the smoke cross the Hudson River. He had been photographing the Twin Towers since they went up in the 1970s, from Bayonne, from Weehawken, from Manhattan and Brooklyn — from wherever a man could stand and see them. He has returned every year since to photograph the Tribute in Light.

Forty years of that work is now a book, and pre-orders open today. “America’s Providence: 9/11 Tribute in Photographs- Faith, Freedom and the Forces That Would Undo America” publishes September 15, 2026 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, and the two hundred fiftieth year of the United States.

The book does not begin in 2001. It begins on April 30, 1789, when George Washington arrived at Federal Hall in New York City to take the first oath of office under the Constitution. No Bible had been provided. A man named Jacob Morton was sent running to St. John’s Lodge No. 1 and returned with theirs. Washington swore on it, kissed the page, and led the First Congress on foot toward Trinity Church to pray for the new nation — but Trinity had burned in the Great Fire of 1776, and only its walls were still standing. So the procession walked several blocks farther, to a modest chapel called St. Paul’s.

There, on ground that would one day border the World Trade Center, America was prayed for as a complete and constituted nation for the first time.

Two hundred and twelve years later, that same chapel stood one block from the falling towers. It did not lose a pane of glass.

“Every year, people come from all over the world to see where the towers once stood,” Rossi said. “Most of them walk right past the chapel where this country was first prayed for and dedicated to God — the God of the Bible. So when they look up and see One World Trade Center standing in the Manhattan skyline, they should know: that is the ground where the United States was dedicated to God.”

Over 50 of Rossi’s own photographs anchor the book — the towers rising in the 1970s, four decades of changing light from both sides of the Hudson, the smoke pouring across the river that Tuesday morning, and a selection of images of the Tribute in Light rising every year since. But the book does not stop at the towers, or at grief.

It recovers the September 11 boatlift, in which ordinary boat crews — ferries, tugs, dinner cruisers, whatever could carry a passenger — evacuated nearly half a million people from Lower Manhattan in roughly nine hours: the largest maritime evacuation in history, larger than Dunkirk, and largely forgotten outside the harbor itself.

It traces a lesser-known founding story as well. In 1782, with the Revolutionary War cutting off the import of English Bibles, a Philadelphia printer named Robert Aitken petitioned the Continental Congress to approve the first complete English-language Bible printed on American soil. Congress had its own chaplains examine the text, and on September 12, 1782, formally recommended the finished work to the American people. The book sets down what that resolution actually said — and what it did not say — alongside the record of what it cost the printer who made it happen.

And it takes up a question many American readers have never had answered plainly: whether the phrase “separation of church and state” appears anywhere in the Constitution. It does not. The book traces the phrase to a private letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 — more than a decade after the First Amendment was ratified — and to the Supreme Court decision, more than a century later, that first gave it legal force.

“A nation founded on rock has been quietly moved onto sand,” Rossi said, referring to a passage in the book’s opening chapter that compares St. Paul’s Chapel to a nearby government building that cracked on September 11 because half of its foundation rested on landfill rather than bedrock. “That is not a lesson about masonry.”

“America’s Providence” is available for pre-order now at americasprovidence.com in four editions. Pre-order pricing runs through publication day: softcover at $45.00 (regularly $55.00), hardcover at $69.00 (regularly $89.00), and the digital edition at $12.99. A signed and numbered Limited Edition of 1,776 copies — the founding year taken as the size of the print run — is offered only during 2026, at $250.00, and will not be reprinted once the year closes.

The book runs over 250 pages in full color, 8.5 by 11 inches, and includes source notes for its historical claims throughout.

About the Author

Dave Rossi is a New Jersey-based photographer who has worked throughout the New York metropolitan area for more than forty years. He has photographed the lower Manhattan skyline from both sides of the Hudson since the Twin Towers were built, watched them fall from the Jersey City waterfront on September 11, 2001, and has returned each year since to photograph the Tribute in Light. “America’s Providence” is the results.
Interviews and resources are available on request.

Media Contact: Dave Rossi – press@daverossi.com – (908) 264-5095 – americasprovidence.com

Dave Rossi
Dave Rossi Photography
+1 908-264-5095
staff@daverossi.com
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