Memorializing Pearl Harbor

Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented-in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming-Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.

“"With engaging prose, theoretical sophistication, and rich observation, Geoffrey M. White advances a new understanding of public commemoration as deeply affective work for those whose voices are remembered, forgotten, or excluded. Memorializing Pearl Harbor fills a huge lacuna in the study of contemporary American memory and breaks new ground in its ethnographic depth and historical breadth by bringing a range of sites of memory production into one comprehensive account. It is a tour de force."”

"This well-researched, provocative study, written for specialists rather than general readers, will be of considerable interest to students of ethnography, public history, and museum studies. Highly recommended." -- C. J. Weeks Choice
"Geoffrey M. White has written a book that goes far beyond the events and commemoration of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the opening salvo that determined the US entry into World War II. White’s book addresses some of the most vital questions of remembering the past with a prose that is engaging, accessible, always pregnant with possibilities for new insights and with wide-ranging applications." -- Gretchen Engle Schafft Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
"Geoffrey M. White’s study of memorial practices at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, makes a significant and unique contribution to the study of commemorating the past." -- John Bodnar Journal of American History
"This is a book with many stories to tell.  . . . White’s writing is masterful; demonstrating a rare gift for rendering complex themes and complicating received categories in flowing, accessible prose. There’s a surfeit of riches here difficult to do justice to, with nearly every page holding some nugget worthy of quotation or comment. Students of history and memory, museology, World War II, film and race, tourism and other themes too numerous to list will find exploring this book time well spent." -- Andrew J. Connelly Pacific Affairs
"Memorializing Pearl Harbor is a welcome contribution to the field of historical reconciliation, which is broadening its horizons beyond the confines of the West. . . . It is a thoughtful ethnography that illuminates the shifts in meaning, purpose, institutional conditions, and civic engagement as framed by the overarching understanding that the memorial we see today is a result of long-term negotiations, intense emotional dialogues, and conflicting memories surrounding the events of 7 December 1945 in a complex historical setting." -- Akiko Hashimoto Monumenta Nipponica
"A model study in the field of public history." -- James I. Matray Pacific Historical Review
"Memorializing Pearl Harbor is unparalleled in its contribution to the study of collective memory of World War II in the Pacific." -- Kate C. Lemay Reviews in American History
"An ambitious melding of ethnographic and historiographical writing and an important contribution to current discussions of memory and representation of the past." -- Matthew Penney The Public Historian
"A well-written and well-researched book that examines the changing meanings and representations of the Pearl Harbor Memorial. White’s study underscores multiple, yet often conflicting, remembrances of the Pearl Harbor attack and the challenges that educators face. . . . The volume is thought provoking, and anyone who is interested in war and memory, the Pearl Harbor attack, peace education, historical reconciliation, and public history will probably find the book insightful and enlightening." -- Takashi Yoshida Anthropos

Geoffrey M. White is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i. He is the coeditor of Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), also published by Duke University Press, and author of Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society.

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