Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) 65079th Edition

Wonderfully concise yet thorough! Great source of primary and secondary source documents! Worked great for school.

This was required reading for a class at western michigan university.Interesting book and good factual information. I recommend it.

It was a bit dry of a read. But it makes its points very clear, as to how Pearl Harbor was really unavoidable.

in good condition

Really interesting and great format.

Akira Iriye's Pearl Harbour and the Coming of the Pacific War is divided into two parts, with the first a collection of primary texts from the diplomatic run-up to Japan's attack on the United States, and the second a selection of commentaries from historians. The source extracts include letters and memoranda from the Japanese and American sides, plus transcripts of a few key Tokyo government conferences. Framing these are short introductions by Iriye, but this is a textbook and the aim is to prime the student with questions more than to provide interpretations. Likewise, the secondary material is designed to illustrate a divergence of views on Pearl Harbour: whether it was the result of an intelligence failure on the American side, what were the actual chances of peace, whether Japanese motives had primarily to do with the oil supply, with China, or with grabbing British colonies, how much the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy mattered, etc..This is an interesting and well-conceived little volume. It is focused and clear, and should be of great value to the history student who seems to be its target public. And if it has a message, it is that diplomatic history is not a straightforward matter of drawing facts from government and consular missives. The primary sources show subtle and not-so-subtle differences of interpretation between both sides. The protocols contain blatant, hard-to-interpret ambiguities. And the secondary literature also illustrates to what extent angles of vision affect diplomatic choices. My only criticism, albeit minor, is that I would have welcomed more engagement from Iriye himself and more scrutiny of Japanese sources in domestic context, and perhaps even a full cultural decoding of the differing Japanese and American approaches to the negotiations of 1941.Akira Iriye is a historian of American diplomacy and American-East Asian relations. He was born in Tokyo but studied in the US and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he returned to teach after holding various Japanese and American posts. A prominent writer in his field, he was appointed President of the American Historical Association and served as president for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In a landmark 1979 journal article on culture, power, and international relations (published in Diplomatic History, unfortunately not available online), he called for integrating domestic culture into the history of international affairs. This book is an interesting example of such an attempt, though it falls short as a full realisation of that call.

very insightful as to the acts that would be come upon the attack on pearl harbor. very well written essays that explain different views on how other countries perceived the attack.