History is not a record of facts and just the facts, but rather a collection of significant tidbits plucked from among the accessible data and then arranged and interpreted. Historians do this plucking, arranging and interpreting for a living: They publish their arrangements and interpretations as articles and books.
But we all do the same -- all of the time. So prevalent is this mediation of history that it has itself become an object of study, and Emily S. Rosenberg's "A Date Which Will Live" is an example of this sort of scholarship. It is an examination, not of what happened at Pearl Harbor on that infamous day, but rather, as the book's subtitle says, of Pearl Harbor in American memory.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor, Rosenberg suggests, has never been just an event in the history of World War II. It is, in addition, "an icon -- a site suggesting a cluster of meanings -- [which] has offered 'rhetorical resources' to support many different narratives, drawing a multitude of lessons." These different narratives, this multitude of lessons, are the focus of her book.