800 Miles from Ground Zero: 9/11's Impact on Central Illinois is a four-part podcast series that documents how people currently living in the Champaign-Urbana (CU), IL area experienced September 11, 2001. Uni High School students collected perspectives from community members who lived in CU, New York, and Washington on 9/11/01, members of the local Muslim community, veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, university experts and anti-war activists to uncover how 9/11 influenced our understanding of U.S. foreign policy, our local efforts at “homeland security,” and how those efforts both divided and brought a nation together.

In the wake of Sept. 11, federal officials said the United States needed a new, state-of-the-art facility to defend against bioterrorism and stop diseases that could devastate the country’s farm economy and threaten human lives. They chose Manhattan, Kansas, as the site of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility.