More events happened on Sept. 11, 2001, than attacks in the skies, novelist and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll told a crowd of about 50 people Wednesday.

“My question is a simple one: Which story do we tell?” Carroll said.

In what Carroll called a “coincidence of dates,” he cited famous events ranging from the early 20th century to present day in his presentation at the McCormick Tribune Center.

Carroll said the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, were important — but he emphasized that other prominent events also took place on those dates.

Carroll pointed to the groundbreaking of the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 1941, and Mahatma Gandhi’s institution in South Africa of the first mass non-violence campaign on Sept. 11, 1906, as dates that often are overlooked in America’s past.

“We need to keep other stories alive, not just the Sept. 11 story that fills us with regret,” Carroll said.

Carroll, who won the National Book Award in 1996 for his memoir “An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us,” also has a personal connection to the terrorist attack on the Pentagon — his father’s office was in the building that American Airlines flight No. 77 hit.

Carroll criticized the exclusively negative connotations of Sept. 11 and condemned the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. The United States labeled the attacks as an act of war requiring a military response, he added, but war was the wrong approach for the country to take.

“We should have defined the crime of Sept. 11 as a crime and mounted a massive law enforcement project,” Carroll said. “The bludgeon of war was the wrong way to respond.”

“The time to find a new way to resolve conflict has come,” said Carroll, suggesting that the U.S. response to attacks such as Sept. 11 needs to shift from war to law.