In honor of the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday, MSNBC posted a series of photos taken that day, including one amazing shot of female firefighters directing a hose shortly after the bombing. Many readers asked questions about the women and now the site is trying to use the power of the internet to identify them. Hopefully they're still around, because it looks like they'd have a hell of a story.
DISCUSSION
This is a really cool photo, and frankly, who cares if it's staged? The photo of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima is obviously staged, and yet we lionize it to no end.
History is to a large degree what we make of it.
It is not only how we record history that matters, but how we choose to interpret those recordings that matters. This photo may not be history-as-it-happened, but it is easy to understand that it is history-as-it-was, which is infinitely more interesting and important.