Attack on Pearl Harbour (The Documentary history series)

The Documentary History series recreates its subjects primarily through eyewitness accounts, using selections from a wide range of sources contemporary to the event to portray "history as it actually happened." This is overstating the case to some extent, but the series does have the definite virtue of introducing students to doing research from primary sources. In "Attack on Pearl Harbor," Roger Parkinson recounts the events leading up to the infamous attack on December 7, 1941, as well as the air attack and its immediate aftermath. Parkinson is not simply relating history but creating a sense of the tensions that led to the attack, using key documents and eyewitness accounts to underline the reason why the surprise attack succeeded. Students will also find the Pearl Harbor attack put in the context of Japan's ambitions in the Far East. Using sources from America, Britain and Japan, Parkinson shows how Washington and London tried to avoid going to war with Japan while the planned attack was already in action. Some of the extracts were being published for the first time after being released from security classification. Meanwhile there are several dozen black & white photographs from the period, many of which will be familiar to students of Pearl Harbor, but several of which should be new to such readers. My conviction is that this look at the "Attack on Pearl Harbor" is not the first book a young student interested in the subject should turn to, but after they have read a basic history text this one will help them flesh it out. To be clear, Parkinson does not simply cut and paste excerpts from primary sources together; his voice provides the narrative framework. But then he uses such diverse sources as the rules set down by General Nogi Maresuke, the tutor for the Emperor Hirohito, the National Defense Act of 1940, Cordell Hull's Ten Point Note, and the memoirs of Winston Churchill. Parkinson divides the book into eight chapters, but each page has subheadings in the margins that will help you follow the historical chronology and effectively outline the chapters. The other volumes in the Documentary History Series look at not just events from the 20th century such as "Italy Under Mussolini," "Hiroshima," and "The Cold War," but cover topics all the way back to "The Vikings." Actually a lot of the volumes books go back more than a few centuries, with "The Black Death and Peasant's Revolt," "The Trial and Execution of Charles I," and "Battle of the Spanish Armada" catching my eye, mainly because the options for primary documents on some of those have to be pretty limited, compared to what you would have for something like "The Third Reich." It is the documents that make these volumes worth checking out because an appreciation of primary documents is key to an appreciation of history (and your ability to deal with primary documents will impress teachers a lot more than cutting and pasting things from the Internet).