Use of MAX function - right or wrong?

I'm trying to create an SQL query using a table with two fields. There are multiple date rows in column B associated with each row in column A. I was looking at using the MAX function to retrieve the most current date value for each data row in column A, but the MAX function only retrieves a single data row with the most recent date, irrespective of the values in column A. Is there a way around this?

Here's an example of my scenario:

Item_No        Date
======        ====
001                01/01/03
001                31/01/03
001                02/02/03
001                28/02/03
002                01/01/03
002                04/01/03
003                07/01/03

Instead of retrieving three data rows with my query (one for each unique Item_No), all I'm returning is the data row with Item_No 003 because it's the one with the most current date. Can someone shed some light on where I went wrong? Here's one of my SQL statements:

SELECT item_no, date FROM tablename

WHERE date =

(SELECT MAX(date) FROM tablename) Received on Wed Jul 09 2003 - 16:17:58 CDT