Date Which Will Live

December 7, 1941—the date of Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—is "a date which will live" in American history and memory, but the stories that will live and the meanings attributed to them are hardly settled. In movies, books, and magazines, at memorial sites and public ceremonies, and on television and the internet, Pearl Harbor lives in a thousand guises and symbolizes dozens of different historical lessons. In A Date Which Will Live, historian Emily S. Rosenberg examines the contested meanings of Pearl Harbor in American culture.Rosenberg considers the emergence of Pearl Harbor’s symbolic role within multiple contexts: as a day of infamy that highlighted the need for future U.S. military preparedness, as an attack that opened a "back door" to U.S. involvement in World War II, as an event of national commemoration, and as a central metaphor in American-Japanese relations. She explores the cultural background that contributed to Pearl Harbor’s resurgence in American memory after the fiftieth anniversary of the attack in 1991. In doing so, she discusses the recent “memory boom” in American culture; the movement to exonerate the military commanders at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short; the political mobilization of various groups during the culture and history "wars" of the 1990s, and the spectacle surrounding the movie Pearl Harbor. Rosenberg concludes with a look at the uses of Pearl Harbor as a historical frame for understanding the events of September 11, 2001.

“‘Remember Pearl Harbor.’ Every radio program during my World War II childhood ended with that slogan. Emily S. Rosenberg has written a splendid history of the contested memories of Pearl Harbor over the past sixty years, memories that frame American opinions of everything from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's war against the Axis to President George W. Bush's war against the axis of evil.”—James M. McPherson, author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg, "A Date Which Will Live makes a valuable contribution to understanding how World War II is perceived in American cultural memory. The author . . . is judicious in her survey of viewpoints on Pearl Harbor.", “Emily S. Rosenberg has given us a fine, concise study of war, memory, and mythmaking in America that will prove equally appealing to teachers, students, and general readers.”—John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, "No one familiar with Rosenberg's work will be surprised to learn that A Date Which Will Live is both high-quality scholarship and a pleasure to read. The strengths of Rosenberg's earlier books and articles are present here: attentiveness to ambiguity and nuance, a beguiling prose style, and-most important-a capacity to break down the barriers between diplomatic and cultural history so thoroughly that one often forgets the obdurateness with which those fields have been segregated until recently. . . . A Date Which Will Live is a major achievement that fully measures up to the standards we have come to expect from this scholar.", “To trace and analyze the changing images of the Pearl Harbor attack held by generations of Americans is a daunting task, requiring the skills of a seasoned cultural and social historian. Emily S. Rosenberg superbly fits the requirements. This is the best, perhaps the only, study of the Pearl Harbor icon.”—Akira Iriye, author of Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War

Emily S. Rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. She is the author of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (also published by Duke University Press) and Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. She is coauthor of In Our Times: America since World War II and Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People.