December 7, 1941 was a grim rude awakening for the United States. America was part of a world dissolving into global industrial scale bloodshed. The attack on Pearl Harbor exposed the vulnerability and disarray of the U.S. Military in 1941. But it also motivated a resolve that America had never before experienced – a unity that redefined a nation still simmerring with divisions left over from the Civil War days. America’s entry into the Great War of 1914-1919 was an acknowledgement of its arrival as a world power, no longer anyone’s former colony. The nation’s entry into World War II was a righteous cause to redress a wound everyone in the country felt. In this audio essay, John Hockenberry explains how 70 years after the Peal Harbor attacks, the period of history that began on December 7, 1941 is still going on.
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