September 11, 2011, marked the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Next week, December 7, 2011, will mark the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Though news sources, lesson plans, and other materials draw parallels between the attacks, it is important to remember that they occurred in different times and places. What led to the attack on Pearl Harbor? What did the attack entail? What effect did it have on the U.S.? How was the attack memorialized (or not) in later years?

We've gathered all of our resources on the attack on Pearl Harbor on our spotlight page, Remembering Pearl Harbor. Learn about the attack and popular memory with oral history, discover lesson plans and more exploring the context of the attack, and uncover photographs of U.S. participation in World War II.

After you've explored our spotlight, check out these websites for more resources on Pearl Harbor and the anniversary:

• Read the one-line naval dispatch that was the first official announcement of the attack at the Library of Congress's December 7 "Today in History" feature, and check out suggestions for teaching about Pearl Harbor with oral history and music. The Library has also assembled a small collection of oral histories in honor of the anniversary.
• NARA examines the same naval dispatch, and suggests ways to use it with students. You can also view photos of the attack.
• Take advantage of EDSITEment's lesson plans on pre-World War II relations between the U.S. and Japan and on World War II's Pacific theatre.
• Find lesson plans and essays on U.S. involvement in World War II in the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's online journal, History Now.
• At HISTORY.com, watch video clips of the attack, oral history interviews, and presidential addresses, and explore an interactive on the theatres of World War II.
• Get students thinking about the attack's connections to today with a lesson plan from the New York Times.
• Read front-page headlines from the day of and the day after the attack, courtesy of the Washington Post. The Post also lists widespread myths about Pearl Harbor.

What constitutes the limits of dramatic license in fictional motion pictures set within the framework of a historical event? Filmmakers have regularly argued that the need for drama always outweighs the need for plausibility and historical accuracy. Audiences have generally bought the argument, as have the filmmakers themselves. Does it matter that Steven Spielberg portrays the Pentagon receiving word of the death of two Ryan brothers on Omaha Beach within two days of D-Day? Does it matter that a German fighter plane flew to the vicinity of Greenland as shown in U-571? Does it matter that Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders never flew in formation during the attack on Tokyo as shown in Pearl Harbor?

Who cares? After watching U-571, one person said, “If I want to see the truth, I will watch PBS.” But does falsifying or fabricating events add to the drama, or is good drama incompatible with truth? Clearly painting the name Enola Gay on the wrong side of the fuselage in The Beginning or the End (1947) and Above and Beyond (1952) adds nothing to the drama of Paul Tibbets's mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Does the mistake matter? On the other hand, portraying Tibbets as feeling guilty for carrying out his assignment, as Above and Beyond clearly does, falsifies history. Do the directors' justification that they could not show an American officer in 1952 willingly killing 80,000 people suffice?

Jonathan Mostow, director of U-571, claimed he was making a fictional story, not a documentary, about life aboard a submarine during the battle of the Atlantic and therefore he did not have to portray history accurately. Nevertheless, the British immediately took offense, claiming he was turning the Royal Navy's capture of an Enigma machine from a German submarine in 1941 into an American heist in 1942. Mostow denied he was doing this, pointing out that the British used a destroyer while he used a submarine. With U-571, the problems had less to do with history than with plausibility. The Germans did fly four-engine patrol planes over the North Atlantic but certainly not single-engine fighters. Whether an American submarine disguised as a German submarine might capture a U-boat might not be too farfetched, at least as portrayed in the movie. But having a second German submarine, in the dark of night, in a driving rainstorm recognize what was happening and figure out which one to torpedo stretches credibility beyond any realistic limits. Likewise, having the American boarding party know how immediately to start the disabled German submarine and get underway strains believability. Worse, submariners have attested to the virtual impossibility of one submarine torpedoing another submarine when both were submerged with the technology available early in the war.

U-571 remains probably the most exciting submarine movie ever made. Nevertheless, the factual and historical errors in the film prevented the director, Mostow, from fulfilling his goal of providing the contemporary generation with any real sense of life aboard a World War II submarine. His response to critics of the film: “Hey folks, it's only a movie.” In contrast, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay tried to have it both ways with Pearl Harbor. On one hand, both men claimed they were making a fictional movie using the historical events only as the stage on which to create a love story. On the other hand, Bay predicted before the start of production, “You will see what happened at Pearl Harbor like you have never seen it in any other movie. Our goal is to stage the event with utmost realism.” He claimed that he wanted his Pearl Harbor movie to become one “by which all other films are measured,” dismissing Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) as being “more of a documentary.”

To achieve these goals, Bay and Bruckheimer claimed to have read extensively in the histories about Pearl Harbor and to have interviewed many Pearl Harbor and Doolittle raid survivors. Noting that everyone had his or her own memories that did not always agree with others' on particular aspects of the Japanese attack, the filmmakers felt their re-creation was as valid as any of the recollections.

Of course, all memories are created equal, but some are more equal; where truth conflicted with drama, Bay and Bruckheimer chose to go with the drama, claiming they had captured the essence of what had happened on December 7. In fact, “essence” remains a very subjective term that can conceal a plethora of sins. One of the trailers for the film perhaps said it best: “Pearl Harbor is a fictional tale crafted from a kaleidoscope of real life personal experiences of those living through this terrifying tragedy.” The operative word is “fictional.” So little of what appears on the screen bears even a remote resemblance to actual events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the actual attack, or the aftermath, including the Doolittle raid, that audiences come away from the film with no real understanding of what happened and why. If the film's title had remained “Tennessee,” the original code name Disney gave the project to hide its actual subject, Bay and Bruckheimer, like Mostow, could have hidden behind the claim that they were only making a dramatic movie, not a documentary.

However, the title Pearl Harbor and Bay's predictions about what he intended to do strongly suggest the film is providing a reasonably accurate account of what happened on December 7. Historians have to be careful to criticize the elephants, not the ants, when discussing the dramatic license filmmakers take in their movies. But audiences have to know little or nothing about Pearl Harbor to recognize the errors or fabrications. In view of the recent attention given to President Franklin D. Roosevelt because of the dedication of his memorial, most people understand that he simply could not stand up unaided, as happens in the movie.

Likewise, since the movie portrays the growing tensions between Japan and the United States and relates at least superficially the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor, audiences are going to wonder how one of the heroes could manage to get permission to fly his P-40 over Pearl Harbor at dusk. While Bay commented with pride about the film's signature shot of a bomb falling slowly downward toward the Arizona, people recognize the hokiness of the sequence even if they do not know that the battleship was hit after the Oklahoma, not before, as portrayed.

In fact, the reviewer has compiled a five-page list of “flaws” in Pearl Harbor. Do they matter? Only to the extent that truth itself matters. For most historians the liberties the filmmakers took with the facts render Pearl Harbor useless as a tool to teach students about the Japanese attack. From the Japanese perspective, however, the film has a significant upside. Most people went to see Pearl Harbor for the love story and the explosions and so left the theater without any significant antagonism toward those friendly people who brought the United States into World War II and later began making fine cars, cameras, television sets, and video recorders.

Five years ago, during my first year of teaching Advanced Placement U.S. History in Leesburg, VA, I created a final exam for my students that I hoped would change the way they thought about monuments and memorials.

For the students to fully execute this project, they first had to understand the purposes of monuments and memorials. We spent two days reading materials that discussed the goals of monuments and memorials. Students also read an article from the Washington Post Magazine that detailed a failed attempt to build a monument on the National Mall. The third day we watched History Channel videos on the presidential monuments and war memorials and critiqued the information that was presented on each. After our discussion on the videos was completed, I introduced the students to the final exam project.

The project was to create a 45-minute tour of a monument or memorial in Washington, DC. Each year, I pre-selected 15 monuments and memorials that were in walking distance of each other. I divided the students into groups of three or four and gave them five class days to plan the tours and accompanying brochures. Each tour and brochure had to explain the purpose of the monument and memorial and help visitors understand its role in history. Both the tour and the brochure had to use at least one primary as well as one secondary source for the information presented.

The students also had to create an activity that reinforced the information they presented to the audience. This activity had to be something that everyone could participate in and that incorporated the sources from the tour the group presented. I purposely did not give much guidance on the activities beyond emphasizing the need for primary and secondary sources. I wanted students to create their own activity that they believed helped to explain the monument or memorial to the group.

Throughout the year in my classroom, we had worked with primary and secondary sources, which prepared students to work with sources on their own for this project. To the students, primary and secondary sources are generally items that they use for research purposes—not incorporate into an active event like a tour—so this stretched their understanding of how to use sources and of how to create historical meaning.

I made sure that there were no duplicate groups and that students had plenty of resources available to use. Before assigning the project, I made a trip to the National Park Service Ranger Station in Washington, DC, to pick up brochures on individual monuments and memorials and a trip to my local library to take out books on the monuments and memorials. (It was near the end of the school year, so computer labs and the school library were in high demand).

The sources and books ranged from children's books and nonfiction sources to historical association publications. When the students were researching for their tours, I wanted them to have a mix of sources available so that they could create a unique tour.

I researched each monument and memorial to make sure they had primary and secondary sources available that the students could find through the different National Park Service websites. I explained, though, that the primary and secondary sources did not have to be just about the monument and memorial—they could be from a spectator, newspaper, fundraising committee, or a schedule of opening day events. I wanted the students to realize that primary and secondary sources of a historic site are not just the building plans but anything that deals with the site!

When the students were researching, finding, and printing their sources, they analyzed sources in terms of usefulness for the tour and accessibility for the audience. Many found that the primary sources they selected allowed them to weave a story into their tour. I didn't have any guiding activities for their primary/secondary sources so the students had to analyze and synthesize the information on their own.

I was nervous to let the students go like this, but I knew they had to do the analysis on their own to be able to speak intimately of the monument or memorial on their tour. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial group did this with ease. Although they were excellent students in my class, they had not been comfortable with primary source analysis in our previous in-class activities. The group began by searching for only primary sources dealing with the building of the monument, letters from veterans, legislation in Congress, and the plans from Maya Lin.

I kept encouraging this group to look through the books I had checked out from the private library, but they were determined to sort through what they had found online and in journals in the school library. The group took the approach of observing the materials, seeing who wrote them, finding bias, and trying to connect the sources all together. They were able to find a common thread between all the sources but they were still missing a piece that would connect the audience to the memorial personally.

When the students finally started going through the public library material, they found a book that changed the focus of their tour. The book was Offerings at the Wall: Artifacts from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. One student made a decision—she was going to let the offerings (primary sources left behind at the wall) take the lead. The group laid their sources out on a desk. They had photocopied offerings that they liked from the book and placed them with the other primary sources they had collected to construct a narrative for their tour. This was an extremely effective way to demonstrate the connection between the memorial and its visitors.

I collected the brochures the students created before we went on the field trip to Washington, DC. I did this for two reasons: one, so that I had time to grade the brochures, and two, so that the students could not rely on their brochures to present the tours. I didn't want them to just walk through the sites using their brochures; I wanted them to add to them with additional information that they had found through their research.

The day we left for the trip, the students came prepared with props, primary sources, handouts, and prizes for their activities. Each student received a response booklet that they were to fill out for each tour. My questions in the booklet aimed at what the students learned and the strengths and weaknesses that they saw. I had my own grading rubric to use and the chaperones who came with me were also assigned rubrics to grade with so that I could reference them later.

The first presentation was the hardest for the students but once one group went, the rest were relieved and couldn't wait to present. I had high expectations for the tours and the students knew this. My secondary goal of this project was to impart my passion for historical sites and discussing them to the students, and I could see that my passion had passed on to several of the students.

For each tour, every student had to talk for at least 15 minutes (for groups of three, or 11 minutes for groups of four) and had to draw on one source in his or her portion. The groups that brought pictures or documents to hold or pass around to the audience were usually the ones that the other students enjoyed most.

The best part for all of us was the activities that went along with each tour. The students really went above and beyond in planning activities to review what they talked about. Many of the groups found additional primary sources for this portion. They would either do a card sort where you mix and match the picture to a person or you would have to put pictures in chronological order based on the building of the monument or memorial. Several students also planned scavenger hunts around their monument or memorial.

The activities were usually based on the size of the monument and memorial. For example, the Washington Monument usually had a matching activity due to the limited access to the monument and the structure of it. The 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence Memorial had a scavenger hunt based on the information on each plate since it was a smaller memorial with full access.

One memorial that invoked a lot of emotion for the students and for which students found primary sources easily is the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II by Union Station. This site is beautiful and the students really loved exposure to this piece of history. The site is dedicated to Japanese Americans' participation in World War II from military service to the internment camps.

The best tour site for a group of four was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, which is divided into four sections. The World War II Memorial was good for a larger group because I could divide the students into the Atlantic and Pacific fronts.

To talk for 45 minutes about a monument or memorial is not easy if you do not know the information well. Having students base the tour on primary sources forced them to look in the past and find out about the monument or memorial as it was being built and presented to the public.

My overall goal was to expose students to the resources and history that surround them. These students may or may not go back to these sites, but they will remember their stories and the stories monuments and memorials can tell. A few, I feel, will return and be able to tell the people they are with a little bit about what they are seeing.