Pearl Harbor: History and Memory Across Asia and the Pacific

FAIN: BH-50411-10

Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West, Inc. (Honolulu, HI 96848-1601)
Namji Steinemann (Project Director: March 2010 to April 2012)

Two one-week Landmarks workshops for eighty school teachers on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, its global context, and its place in cultural memory.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was a seminal event in the 20th century history of the United States. It not only engendered cultural associations for Americans, it forged definitions of American destiny and identity. Pearl Harbor has since become an enduring part of U.S. popular history (and a site of cultural memory) of an event that forever changed the United States, with ramifications that continue to unfold in the United States, Japan, and across the Asia Pacific region. The proposed workshop, "Pearl Harbor: History and Memories Across Asia and the Pacific," will place the Pearl Harbor attack in its proper global context so as to help teachers identify teaching points that address the event's broader historical, social, and cultural relevance for middle and high school humanities curricula.