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Important point on the need for detailed historical work to unpack the “tension between determinacy and contingency.” Narratives about America’s entry into war against Germany after Pearl Harbor are flavored by later events, but in the moment actors who later recounted feeling assured (like Churchill) were deeply concerned about what the US would do.

When Hitler “declared war on the United States, he also pronounced a sentence of death on the Jews of Western and Central Europe.”

“The global sense of confusion and unpredictability after Pearl Harbor…”