The famous British philosopher and historian, R.G. Collingwood, suggested that a historian must ‘reconstruct’ history by using ‘historical imagination’ to ‘re-enact’ the thought processes of historical persons based on information and evidence from historical sources. That is what the authors of the present book have tried to do. The events of 1971 that resulted in the breakup of Pakistan are a milestone in Pakistan’s history. To retrieve what happened and why it happened is an exercise that so far has been avoided or left at best incomplete. The book based on published and unpublished memories of activists of 1971 attempts to give a critical assessment of the events and spell out lessons that have to be learnt.