Time Machine Tuesday: Pearl Harbor

It was “a date that will live in infamy” — December 7, 1941 — and to this day we still commemorate the attack on Pearl Harbor as one of the most significant events in our country’s history.  Tomorrow, December 7, 2016, will be the 75th Anniversary of the historic event that brought America into WWII.

Here on the homefront, Americans were quick to mobilize and respond.  In Colorado, the Extension Service at the Colorado State College (now Colorado State University) that same month issued their Agricultural Planning Handbook, first in the new Colorado Farm Defense Program series of brochures.  In May 1942 the series was renamed the Colorado Farm Victory Program.  Search our library’s online catalog to view all of the publications in the series and see what Colorado was doing on the agricultural front throughout the war.

Two months after the attack, in February 1942, Governor Ralph Carr convened an assembly of over 250 Coloradans at the State Capitol to discuss “a plan for a statewide program of community civic adult education and information” regarding the war effort.  The report of the assembly, entitled Civilian and Community Morale Through Understanding and Participation, has been digitized by our library and is available to read online.

For an additional perspective on Pearl Harbor’s impact on Colorado, read the article “Pearl Harbor and One Mother’s Heartbreak,” by Clara May Morse, in the anthology Western Voices:  125 Years of Colorado Writing, available for checkout from our library.