Date, Calendar, DateFormat

Is there a book/Website where concepts about Date are laid out real good other than the API.
I have tried studying the API but not able to absorb all the information given there.I have so many questions ... like what is the big deal/significance about January 1, 1970 etc ?
Thanks,
Jennifer

Not sure about the significance of that date, but's really not that important. It's just a relative marker in time. Time is measured as a displacement relative to that date. Since the underlying data behind a Date() is a long, that will let you address +/- 292 Million years from Jan 1 1970, to a precision of a millisecond.
So in the great scheme of things it really wouldn't matter if the "origin" date was 1/1/1000 or 11/11/1967, etc.

Dunno a good, simple, clear resource offhand - I'll leave that to others. As for Jan 1, 1970 - it's just an arbitrary starting point. It was chosen in the early seventies as the reference point used on UNIX systems - simply because it was in the recent past, and had a nice round number. It became standard since then, mostly because there was no particular need to change it. Java was built to appeal to C/C++ programmers, who were used to this sort of thing, and so here we are. It may well still be in use millennia from now, with no one remembering why. (In the novels of Vernor Vinge, people figure it marked the first space flight - even though the time isn't quite right for it. Kind of like how the birth of Christ is now generally believed to be around 4 B.C.)
Ok, so maybe that would've been better in Meaningless Drivel. So, does anyone else have a nice clear resource for this stuff? (Historical minutae are optional.)

I am not aware of a place (web site) where you can get detailed information about the Date API. But if I may make a suggestion, you may wish to use the Calendar API as Date is deprecated.

Bologna. Date is not deprecated. Many specific methods are, but the class itself is alive and well. And Calendar is an ugly monstrosity of a class that takes a huge amount of memory if you're just trying to store a value. It's a good way to manipulate dates, but not to store them. The relationship between Calendar and Date is similar to that between StringBuffer and String. Except that the latter two classes are much better designed.