December 7 · This Day in America
It is a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii. Sailors are at breakfast, flags going up, the harbor still. Then the planes come — wave after wave, with no warning and no declared war — and in under ninety minutes the United States Pacific Fleet is burning at its moorings. More than 2,400 Americans are killed. Nearly half of them die on the USS Arizona, when a bomb reaches her forward magazine and a million pounds of powder ignite; she sinks in nine minutes and never rises. Her crew is still aboard her, beneath the water, to this day. An ocean that had felt like a wall is suddenly no protection at all. By nightfall a country that wanted no part of the world's war knows it is in it. The grief is total. So is the resolve. America wakes up on December 7th and does not go back to sleep for four years.
Source: www.nationalww2museum.org
Also on this day · 1787
In a tavern in Dover, Delaware's ratifying convention votes unanimously to adopt the new Constitution — the first state to do so, five days ahead of anyone else. It is the smallest of the thirteen, and it sprints to be first, proud of it ever after as "The First State." The document is still only ink and hope; no government exists yet under it. But the experiment now has its first yes.
Source: www.loc.gov
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.”Franklin D. Roosevelt, address to Congress, 1941