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Reviews in American History 32.2 (2004) 239-246



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"Infamy" and Other Legacies

Emily S. Rosenberg. A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. x + 248 pp. Bibliography and index. $24.95.

Like many people who ought to have known better, I chose to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of America's most famous military disaster by taking my family to see Jerry Bruckheimer's execrable movie Pearl Harbor (2001). It wasn't a complete waste of time. About halfway through, we got our money's worth. The audience, eyes glazed like a franchise doughnut after slogging through ninety minutes of possibly the least interesting love story in cinema history, was rewarded with a battle sequence that ranked among the wildest ever filmed. The fact that the navy permitted director Michael Bay to blow up ten actual warships while recreating Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters contributed immeasurably to the scene's visual impact, but Bay deserved some credit, too; his skill at orchestrating epic disaster spectacles, already demonstrated in Armageddon (1998) and Bad Boys (1995), was once more in evidence, and stood in customary contrast to his ineptitude with dialogue and character development. One image in the attack scene was genuinely haunting, as rescuers attempted to cut through the hull of the capsized battleship Oklahoma with an acetylene torch; several hands reached up through the narrow incision made by the torch, groped frantically, and then went limp as water levels rose within the ship and the trapped sailors drowned. For a moment, Pearl Harbor succeeded in making its title something more than a cliché. But then screenwriter Randall Wallace spoiled everything—at least for the historians in attendance—by having the character of Danny (played by Josh Hartnett) bark into a telephone: "I think World War II just started!"

That asinine line underscores a key point in Emily S. Rosenberg's book A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory: "for most Americans, the historical narrative of World War II often begins with the Pearl Harbor attack, establishing American military action as reactive and defensive" (p. 15). Obviously, the citizens of other belligerent nations do not share this historical narrative. As Rosenberg notes, "[t]he attack on Pearl Harbor . . . is [End Page 239] hardly a major iconic event for other countries—even for Japan." The Japanese mostly regard the attack as a defensive response to a series of U.S. provocations; from their perspective, it was the Roosevelt administration's oil embargo and related strong-arm tactics that "began" hostilities. For the Chinese, the war "began" either when Japan invaded Manchuria a full decade before Pearl Harbor or in 1937 with Japan's assault on China proper. Europeans tend to consider the Pearl Harbor assault only one of many critical junctures in a conflict touched off by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. And no contemporary observer in any country—including the United States—would have used the expression "World War II" to describe unfolding events in the early 1940s. When Randall Wallace put that anachronistic phrase in Josh Hartnett's mouth, he contributed to what Rosenberg identifies as "a tradition of national history in which World War II makes its appearance on December 7, 1941" (p. 188).

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. What may surprise some readers is the gauntlet-flinging tone Rosenberg adopts in her introduction when she addresses the distinction between "popular" and "professional" reconstructions of the past—or, to use her preferred terms, between "memory" and "history." Rosenberg insists that this distinction, so spiritedly advanced...

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