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Background
Michael's history extension essay was called "Looking in the wrong direction - responsibility for American defensive failures at Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941".
Question 1: Why did you choose the topic?
Transcript of audio file:
Although I spent quite a long time examining and rejecting topics, I stumbled onto Pearl Harbor by a lucky accident. I went to Fisher Library with the intention of researching Erwin Rommel, but was disappointed to find a lack of detailed revisionist literature on him. While there, I noticed a book called Pearl Harbor Redefined suggesting a historical debate on an event I had always been interested in. This book itself turned out to be mostly irrelevant to my final project, but it planted the seed of the idea, which I was then able to expand on with the other resources of the library.
Question 2: What did you know about the topic?
Transcript of audio file:
To be honest not a great deal. I knew the general facts of the attack, and I knew that although it provoked a strong emotional response in the American public , it was not a fatal blow because of its failure to damage the American carriers, which were central to the Pacific air war. But in terms of historiography and the changing interpretations I really didn't know anything at all.
Question 3: What did you expect to find out?
Transcript of audio file:
Coming into the topic, I had assumed that the success was mainly due to Japanese care in maintaining surprise, and didn't know that there were clues and warnings that the Americans should have been able to act upon. I also assumed that blame for the poor defensive efforts should obviously be allocated to the Hawaiian commanders. As I narrowed the topic down to be about communications between Washington and Hawaii, I hoped to find out more about who had access to useful intelligence to predict the attacks, and which of the major players on the American side could be considered to have fulfilled their responsibilities.
Question 4: How does the topic relate to History Extension?
Transcript of audio file:
The concept of historiography comes through clearly in this historical debate. Over time, there have been several official inquiries into the defensive failures, with those run by the civilian government blaming different people to those run by the military. There are also many historical scholars who have produced a range of positions, as they each focus on different evidence and have unique personal backgrounds.
Question 5: What enquiry and research methodologies did you choose? Why?
Transcript of audio file:
My sources came from obvious places: secondary scholarship, in the form of books and reports from the inquiries, and the primary sources contained and analysed within them. I did anticipate the need for an iterative-style process of defining a question, researching that and seeing whether that led to a new question, because it was really necessary to cut down on the amount of material that was relevant to the topic, because the amount of literature available on Pearl Harbor in general is immense.
Question 6: How did you refine a research question, topic or issue into a proposal?
Transcript of audio file:
Firstly, I had to find out what historical debates existed on the topic. This was mainly achieved through examining general references in secondary scholarship, particularly their introductions and in some cases appendices devoted to Revisionism. Revisionism in this topic refers to the change in blame which was originally allocated to Hawaii, shifting over time to be allocated to Washington.
Based on this, I could work out what issues were controversial, and in particular, which controversies had some basis in evidence rather than just being the subjective opinion of the authors, which I felt would be less interesting to examine.In the end, I isolated the debate about communications between Washington and Hawaii, and further refined that to only a few particular messages that I thought were the most important ones, given the word limit constraints of the project.
Question 7: What ethical implications of research had to be considered?
Transcript of audio file:
Really the main ethical consideration in this project was the proper acknowledgement of sources, something which is really essential to History, and in particular projects which are focused on historiography, when the personal perspective and background of the source is almost as important as what the source says itself. So I think proper acknowledgement of sources was really central.