Barbara W. Tuchman

<p>"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." —_Commentary_ </p><p>The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. <strong>Barbara Tuchman</strong> anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived. </p> <p>"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." —_Commentary_ </p><p>The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. <strong>Barbara Tuchman</strong> anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived. </p> <p>

From Barbara W. Tuchman, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August, comes history through a wide-angle lens: a fascinating chronicle of Britain’s long relationship with Palestine and the Middle East, from the ancient world to the twentieth century. Historically, the British were drawn to the Holy Land for two major reasons: first, to translate the Bible into English and, later, to control the road to India and access to the oil of the Middle East. With the lucidity and vividness that characterize all her work, Barbara W. Tuchman follows these twin spiritual and imperial motives—the Bible and the sword—to their seemingly inevitable endpoint, when Britain conquered Palestine at the conclusion of World War I. At that moment, in a gesture of significance and solemnity, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 established a British-sponsored mandate for a national home for the Jewish people. Throughout this characteristically vivid account, Tuchman demonstrates that the seeds of conflict were planted in the Middle East long before the official founding of the modern state of Israel. Praise for Bible and Sword “Tuchman is a wise and witty writer, a shrewd observer with a lively command of high drama.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “In her métier as a narrative popular historical writer, Barbara Tuchman is supreme.”—Chicago Sun-Times

"Narrative history in the great tradition . . ." Chicago TribuneTwo-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bestselling author Barbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland. This compellingly written history paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington and recounts in riveting detail the events responsible for the birth of our nation. <p>"Narrative history in the great tradition . . ." Chicago Tribune<br>Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bestselling author Barbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland. This compellingly written history paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington and recounts in riveting detail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i> <p>"Narrative history in the great tradition . . ." Chicago Tribune<br>Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bestselling author Barbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland. This compellingly written history paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington and recounts in riveting detail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>

<div> <p><strong>A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography </strong><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic">Stilwell and the American Experience in China</span><strong> is a classic in its own right.</strong><br><br>During the summer of 1972--a few short months after Nixon's legendary visit to China--master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read.<br><br>T<span style="color: #000000">uchman’s observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao’s techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman’s “fascinating” ( </span><em style="color: #000000">The New York Review of Books</em><span style="color: #000000"> ) essay, “If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945”—a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that would have changed the course of postwar history. </span></p> <p><strong style="color: #000000">“Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.”—</strong><span style="color: #000000"> The New York Times Book Review</span></p> <h3><span style="color: #000000">Review</span></h3> <p><span style="color: #000000">“Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.” </span><strong style="color: #000000">—</strong><span style="color: #000000"> The New York Times Book Review</span></p> <h3><span style="color: #000000">About the Author</span></h3> <p><strong style="color: #000000">Barbara W. Tuchman</strong><span style="color: #000000"> (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with </span><em style="color: #000000">The Zimmermann Telegram</em><span style="color: #000000"> and international fame with </span><em style="color: #000000">The Guns of August</em><span style="color: #000000"> —a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include </span><em style="color: #000000">Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China</em><span style="color: #000000"> (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), </span><em style="color: #000000">Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly,</em><span style="color: #000000"> and </span><em style="color: #000000">The First Salute</em><span style="color: #000000">.</span></p> <h3><span style="color: #000000">Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</span></h3> <p><span style="color: #000000">I </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Standing Up </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance. The dominant fact is that for China’s working class, which is to say over 80 percent of the world’s most populous country, the lid of exploitation has been lifted. While visible betterment varies widely between the major cities and the provinces, it is probably true to say of all areas that the working class, in whose interest China is now governed, have found a sense of purpose, self-­confidence, and dignity in the knowledge that they are the object of the state’s concern, not, as in the past, society’s victims. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">The most obvious negative in the process is the mental monotone imposed upon the country. All thought, all ideas past, present, and future, not to mention the historic record, are twisted, manipulated, rolled out, and flattened into one, expressed in half a dozen slogans dinned incessantly and insistently into the heads of the public. As far as the life of the mind in China is concerned, its scope has rigid limits and its sound is a blaring, endlessly repeated single note, with effect (at least upon a Westerner) like the drip, drip, drip on the victim’s head of the ancient Chinese water torture—­if it had made a loud noise. The message is that “the People” are the motive force; that Marxism-­Leninism is universal truth, and that propelled by its principles and Chairman Mao’s thought, China’s working class can ultimately build Socialism, meaning well-­being for everyone. The goal lies ahead and can only be reached by keeping the Revolution green, that is by continually renewed contact with the masses. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Domestically it seems to work. I say “seems” throughout these notes cautiously and advisedly because ignorance of the language is a barrier equal to being deaf. A six-­week visitor under this handicap can offer conclusions as impressions only. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Perhaps too the transfer to collectivism has been made easier because China’s life was in some ways collective to begin with. Consider the kang, the built-­in wall-­to-­wall bed of north China on which, in the poorer homes, the whole family sleeps. With that in their background, collective adjustment is natural, not to say imperative. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">In any event, from what we could see through eleven cities (Peking, Taiyuan, Yenan, Sian, Loyang, Chengchow, Wuhan, Nanking, Suchow, Shanghai, and Canton) and a variety of rural settlements, collective effort has made up China’s oldest lack—­enough food. Our reception at an agricultural commune in central Shansi included three or four heaping platters each of sliced tomatoes, fresh peaches, and sweetened stuffed dumplings made of glutinous rice (a substance to make a Western stomach quail) in far greater abundance than was required by the company. Admittedly this was laid on to impress the visitors (as was everything else we met in China), but the availability of such abundance to agricultural workers and their un-­hungry attitude toward it were simply not possible in the past when, as one member of the commune said, “The lower peasants could not even have the chaff of the rice to eat.” </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Increased production, materially speaking, is what China’s revolution is all about. It refutes all the firm statements of economists and agronomists in the past that China’s arable land could not be augmented, nor the yield per unit of land be raised sufficiently to feed the expanding population. Both have been done, not by magic but because the people have been mobilized and motivated to do it—­by expropriation and redistribution of land permitting communal farming in large tracts instead of fractional plots, and by the knowledge that everything they do to make improvements will now benefit themselves not the landlord. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">I will cite no statistics on increased yield because I cannot judge their reliability, but in this summer’s drought in north China with day after relentless day of no rain and of temperatures over 100, when one sees fresh water being pumped in life-­giving gushes from irrigation channels, and sees surrounding fields green, vegetables ripening, and seedling crops sprouting instead of withering, one needs no statistics. In the old days this year’s drought would have been lethal. The great Miyun Dam and Reservoir northeast of Peking, the pumping stations and sedimentation plants along the Yellow River that have at last harnessed “China’s Sorrow,” and similar projects constructed elsewhere under the new regime, besides providing hydroelectric power, have brought drought, flood, and famine under control. The result provides the agricultural surplus which, paid in kind to the state as a form of tax, supplies the capital for expansion of industry—­the other of the two legs on which the new China walks. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">In human terms the process has produced a new person—­the worker from the ranks who can become manager of the enterprise. It is true that such people do not bear sole responsibility. They function in committee in a three-­in-­one arrangement of workers, technicians, and “cadres” or representatives of the Government. Even so, in their straightforward look-­you-­in-­the-­eye greeting, their poise and self-­respect, they are impressive, none more so than the woman Vice-­Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Szu Tzi Ching (Evergreen) Commune outside Peking. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Quiet, composed, and supremely assured, with bobbed hair, neat overblouse, loose trousers, and a big silver wristwatch, she knew every aspect of the operation: the crop rotation, marketing, fertilizing, spraying, trucking, livestock, the schools, clinics, and family lives of a commune of 6,000 acres and 41,000 people, formerly scattered in hopeless division in 138 villages. Born in a family in the “poor peasant” category, that is, hired or tenant farmers without land of their own, she was now playing a competent role where formerly she had no stake. Her colleague in charge of the orchards, a rough peasant with stubble of beard and sweat towel around his neck, had the same assured air, as did the girl supervisor of the pigsties. Both shook hands with confident equality and exhibited their domains with pride (each ripening peach on the trees was individually bagged and each pig had its own pen). </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Their counterparts in industry—­like the shop foreman whose intense pride is almost tangible as he watches a finished tractor leave the assembly plant—­are equally forthright and precise, in notable contrast to civil servants who, being more vulnerable to the swings and switchbacks of official policy, try to be utterly orthodox and noncommittal to the point of speechlessness. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Obviously the commune and tractor plant were selected showplaces, but the fact that they exist at all and are managed in part by their workers is a piece of one of the greatest bootstrap operations in history. There have been harsh costs and there are negative aspects, but in these worker-­managers China has visibly, to quote who else but the Chairman, “stood up.” </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">II </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">The People </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Who are “the People,” the subject and object of every political slogan in China? According to Chairman Mao’s definition, “the People” are all who support the Revolution (dutifully said to be 90 to 95 percent). The remainder, consisting of “class enemies,” “bad elements,” and counterrevolutionaries, are merely Citizens. This strikes me as a murky Thought, not one of the Chairman’s best, or else a poor translation, but since it is the official translation, it will have to stand. Theoretically and ideally, then, the People are a mystic whole (leaving aside the bad elements), but in practice class origin is determining. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Workers, peasants, and soldiers are automatically People (although sometimes they are exhorted to “learn from the People,” which is confusing) as is anyone of “poor and lower middle peasant” or other working-­class family. Those who come from landlord, rich peasant, merchant-­capitalist, or bourgeois origin are automatically out, or at least not full members of society until they have proved by deed and attitude that they have repudiated their class values and wholeheartedly adopted Chairman Mao’s “correct revolutionary line” of service to the People. What this requires in outward conformity for those with inner reservations can only be conjectured. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">The masses (and for China the word is appropriate in a descriptive, not necessarily Marxist, sense), pedaling unhurriedly to work on their millions of bicycles through the city streets, filling the now public parks of the Imperial City and Summer Palace, crowding a department store or a museum exhibit of People’s Art, queueing at cooked food shops for a meal in a bowl, appear quite at ease. The economic security of food, paid work, and old-­age pension is a great relaxer of tension, and this appears in faces and manner. China has never been in a hurry, and the pace, even in factory work, is still easygoing. There is no sense of pressure or tension in the air. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">A foreigner feels safe (though not comfortable) walking alone anywhere at any time—­if he can put up with attracting crowds of intense starers. In the countryside and provincial cities he also attracts smiles and spontaneous hand-clapping and almost never a scowl, for the Chinese are an agreeable and normally friendly people. Mrs. Chang Si-­lan, a tiny spry lady in black whose two-­room home (for a family of eight) we visited in a factory compound, welcomed us with such genuine delight that we fell into instant communication. It appeared that she and I were the same age: I pointed to my gray hair while hers was still black; she pointed to her absent teeth while I still had mine. She pressed us to sit beside her on the kang, passed cigarettes, and compared grandchildren. On Mrs. Chang’s level the Chinese do not insist on talking in ritual fatuities. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">“Decorum” is the word for the masses in the capital. Even more notable, in comparison to former times, is their remarkable appearance of health and well-­being, though more so in Peking than in the provinces. The running nose of children, that endemic companion of poverty, has vanished, at least in the main cities. There are no cripples, no beggars, no open sores or disease, although hawking and spitting (outside Peking) are as bad as ever. Even Mao Tse-­tung Thought has found no formula to prevail over that. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">Opium-­smoking, prostitution, and venereal disease have proved easier to eradicate, and according to claims have been wiped out. I cannot vouch for the claim but I can say that any overt interest in sex is simply nonexistent. When the subject came up in conversation with one female interpreter, it produced a grimace of disgust as if we had mentioned a cockroach, and the same expression contorted the face of a doctor of mental health when he was asked about perversions and homosexuality. “We don’t have this in China,” he replied succinctly. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">At a military barracks we visited outside Nanking I noticed no provision for families. The state pays for an officer’s home leave or for visits by his family to the post, I was told, but apart from that he does without a wife’s companionship. After an officer has served fifteen years and “has a good record,” he may apply to have his family live with him. To make sure I had this piece of startling information right, it was repeated for me and confirmed as true for the Army as a whole (although I suspect regional commands vary). When I ventured the comment that this must be a very monastic life, the officer replied, “We consider it a very happy life to live and work with our friends and comrades of the great proletarian People’s Liberation Army.” That is the way they really talk. (It should be added that the PLA has played a genuinely constructive role in the state which, considering the past role of soldiery in Chinese society, is a revolution in itself; but that is another matter.) </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">At a May 7th Cadre School deep in the country where bureaucrats and professionals come for a six-­month term to be “re-­educated” through manual labor, the experience was also celibate. Although they dislike any reference to the question, the Committee was willing to say that their members were too busy with field labor, brick-­making, and building (which in fact was hard real work, not leaf-­raking) to worry about their sex life. Sex was sublimated in the “struggle for production” and for renewed “revolutionary consciousness.” It was the stock answer to be expected, but it is quite possible it may also be true. Whatever the truth, it is evident that in the new society the sex impulse has been pushed deep below the visible surface. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">The effect on the family life of the “cadre” class is cooling. (This ubiquitous and absurd word, pronounced “cadder” by Chinese-­speaking English—­gan bou in Chinese—­is as basic in Communist usage as “peasant.” Originally adopted to mean a government or party bureaucrat, it now loosely covers anyone in an administrative, professional, intellectual, or white-­collar job, in short, everyone who is not worker, peasant, or soldier. There is a sharp distinction between lower-­echelon cadres called “staff members” and the upper-­echelon “leading cadre” who is a person in a position of authority: a minister, bureau chief, manager, director, or head of any organization, except that in theory no one is head because everything is run by committee. The “leading cadre” in each case is Vice-­Chairman of the relevant Revolutionary Committee. Perhaps in deference to Number One, a chairman is either nonexistent or never appears.) </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">As regards family life, many of the cadre class are now confining themselves to one child or two and appear to maintain a rather detached marital relationship. Two of the various escorts who accompanied us at different places and who had working wives or husbands, sent their four-­year-­old children to boarding kindergarten from which the child comes home only for the one-­day weekend. The first of these parents explained airily that “a child at home can be a nuisance, you know.” A third had a more surprising solution: her four-­year-­old son was cared for at home by what she first described as a “roommate,” and only at my evident bewilderment reluctantly confessed was a housemaid! I felt myself dangerously in the presence of Revisionism. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000">This attitude has not yet spread downward, for in the life of the streets, which is the life of the masses, babies and small children are cared for and carried around by brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents (in particular the grandfather); not in the backpack arrangement with head nodding used by the Japanese but cradled in a front-­carry which is certainly less efficient but more affectionate. </span></p></div> <b>A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography <i>Stilwell and the American Experience in China</i> is a classic in its own right.</b><br> <br> During the summer of 1972--a few short months after Nixon's legendary visit to China--master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read.<br> <br> Tuchman's observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao's... <b>A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography <i>Stilwell and the American Experience in China</i> is a classic in its own right.</b><br> <br> During the summer of 1972--a few short months after Nixon's legendary visit to China--master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read.<br> <br> Tuchman's observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao's...

<div> <p><strong>Celebrated for bringing a personal touch to history in her Pulitzer Prize–winning epic</strong> The Guns of August <strong>and other classic books, Barbara W. Tuchman reflects on world events and the historian’s craft in these perceptive, essential essays.</strong> </p> <hr> <p>From thoughtful pieces on the historian’s role to striking insights into America’s past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Spanning more than four decades of writing in <em>The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The Nation,</em> and <em>The Saturday Evening Post,</em> Tuchman weighs in on a range of eclectic topics, from Israel and Mao Tse-tung to a Freudian reading of Woodrow Wilson. This is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent “practicing history.”<br><strong><br></strong>Praise for** Practicing History </p> <p>“Persuades and enthralls . . . I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history.” <strong>—</strong> Chicago Sun-Times<br><strong><br>“Provocative, consistent, and beautifully readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs.” </strong>—Baltimore<strong> Sun<br></strong><br>“A delight to read.”—The New York Times Book Review</p> <h3>Review</h3> <p>“Persuades and enthralls . . . I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history.” <strong>—</strong> Chicago Sun-Times<br><strong><br>“Provocative, consistent, and beautifully readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs.” </strong>—Baltimore<strong> Sun<br></strong><br>“A delight to read.”—The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to the paperback edition.</p> <h3>About the Author</h3> <p><strong>Barbara W. Tuchman</strong> (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with <em>The Zimmermann Telegram</em> and international fame with <em>The Guns of August</em> —a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include <em>Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China</em> (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), <em>Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly,</em> and <em>The First Salute</em>. --This text refers to the paperback edition.</p> <h3>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</h3> <p>I </p> <p>The Craft </p> <p>In Search of History </p> <p>History began to exert its fascination upon me when I was about six, through the medium of the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins. I became absorbed in the fortunes of the Dutch Twins; the Twins of the American Revolution, who daringly painted the name Modeerf, or “freedom” spelled backward, on their row boat; and especially the Belgian Twins, who suffered under the German occupation of Brussels in 1914. </p> <p>After the Twins, I went through a G. A. Henty period and bled with Wolfe in Canada. Then came a prolonged Dumas period, during which I became so intimate with the Valois kings, queens, royal mistresses, and various Ducs de Guise that when we visited the French châteaux I was able to point out to my family just who had stabbed whom in which room. Conan Doyle’s The White Company and, above all, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs were the definitive influence. As the noble Wallace, in tartan and velvet tarn, I went to my first masquerade party, stalking in silent tragedy among the twelve-year-old Florence Nightingales and Juliets. In the book the treachery of the Countess of Mar, who betrayed Wallace, carried a footnote that left its mark on me. “The crimes of this wicked woman,” it said darkly, “are verified by history.” </p> <p>By the time I reached Radcliffe, I had no difficulty in choosing a field of concentration, although it turned out to be History and Lit rather than pure history. I experienced at college no moment of revelation that determined me to write historical narrative. When that precise moment occurred I cannot say; it just developed and there was a considerable time lag. What Radcliffe did give me, however, was an impetus (not to mention an education, but I suppose that goes without saying). Part of the impetus came from great courses and great professors. Of the three to which I owe most, two, curiously enough, were in literature rather than history. They were Irving Babbitt’s Comp Lit II and John Livingston Lowes’s English 72, which included his spectacular tour de force on the origins of “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” He waved at Wordsworth, bowed briefly to Keats and Shelley, and really let himself go through twelve weeks of lectures, tracing the sources of Coleridge’s imagery, and spending at least a week on the fatal apparition of the person from Porlock. What kept us, at least me, on the edge of my seat throughout this exploit was Lowes’s enthusiasm for his subject. </p> <p>This quality was the essence, too, of Professor C. H. McIlwain’s Constitutional History of England, which came up as far as Magna Carta. It did not matter to McIlwain, a renowned scholar and historian, that only four of us were taking his course, or that he had already given it at Harvard and had to come over to repeat it to us (yes, that was the quaint custom of the time). It did not matter because McIlwain was conducting a passionate love affair with the laws of the Angles and the articles of the Charter, especially, as I remember, Article 39. Like any person in love, he wanted to let everyone know how beautiful was the object of his affections. He had white hair and pink cheeks and the brightest blue eyes I ever saw, and though I cannot remember a word of Article 39, I do remember how his blue eyes blazed as he discussed it and how I sat on the edge of my seat then too, and how, to show my appreciation, I would have given anything to write a brilliant exam paper, only to find that half the exam questions were in Anglo-Saxon, about which he had neglected to forewarn us. That did not matter either, because he gave all four of us A’s anyway, perhaps out of gratitude for our affording him another opportunity to talk about his beloved Charter. </p> <p>Professor Babbitt, on the other hand, being a classicist and anti-romantic, frowned on enthusiasm. But his contempt for zeal was so zealous, so vigorous and learned, pouring out in a great organ fugue of erudition, that it amounted to enthusiasm in the end and held not only me, but all his listeners, rapt. </p> <p>Although I did not know it or formulate it consciously at the time, it is this quality of being in love with your subject that is indispensable for writing good history—or good anything, for that matter. A few months ago when giving a talk at another college, I was invited to meet the faculty and other guests at dinner. One young member of the History Department who said he envied my subject in The Guns of August confessed to being bogged down and brought to a dead stop halfway through his doctoral thesis. It dealt, he told me, with an early missionary in the Congo who had never been “done” before. I asked what was the difficulty. With a dreary wave of his cocktail he said, “I just don’t like him.” I felt really distressed and depressed—both for him and for the conditions of scholarship. I do not know how many of you are going, or will go, to graduate school, but when you come to write that thesis on, let us say, “The Underwater Imagery Derived from the Battle of Lepanto in the Later Poetic Dramas of Lope de Vega,” I hope it will be because you care passionately about this imagery rather than because your department has suggested it as an original subject. </p> <p>In the process of doing my own thesis—not for a Ph.D., because I never took a graduate degree, but just my undergraduate honors thesis—the single most formative experience in my career took place. It was not a tutor or a teacher or a fellow student or a great book or the shining example of some famous visiting lecturer—like Sir Charles Webster, for instance, brilliant as he was. It was the stacks at Widener. They were my Archimedes’ bathtub, my burning bush, my dish of mold where I found my personal penicillin. I was allowed to have as my own one of those little cubicles with a table under a window, queerly called, as I have since learned, carrels, a word I never knew when I sat in one. Mine was deep in among the 942s (British History, that is) and I could roam at liberty through the rich stacks, taking whatever I wanted. The experience was marvelous, a word I use in its exact sense meaning full of marvels. The happiest days of my intellectual life, until I began writing history again some fifteen years later, were spent in the stacks at Widener. My daughter Lucy, class of ’61, once said to me that she could not enter the labyrinth of Widener’s stacks without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle. I too was never altogether sure I could find the way out, but I was blissful as a cow put to graze in a field of fresh clover and would not have cared if I had been locked in for the night. </p> <p>Once I stayed so late that I came out after dark, long after the dinner hour at the dorm, and found to my horror that I had only a nickel in my purse. The weather was freezing and I was very hungry. I could not decide whether to spend the nickel on a chocolate bar and walk home in the cold or take the Mass Avenue trolley and go home hungry. This story ends like “The Lady or the Tiger,” because although I remember the agony of having to choose, I cannot remember how it came out. </p> <p>My thesis, the fruit of those hours in the stacks, was my first sustained attempt at writing history. It was called “The Moral Justification for the British Empire,” an unattractive title and, besides, inaccurate, because what I meant was the moral justifying of empire by the imperialists. It was for me a wonderful and terrible experience. Wonderful because finding the material, and following where it led, was constantly exciting and because I was fascinated by the subject, which I had thought up for myself—much to the disapproval of my tutor, who was in English Lit, not History, and interested only in Walter Pater—or was it Walter Savage Landor? Anyway, it was not the British Empire, and since our meetings were consequently rather painfully uncommunicative, I think he was relieved when I took to skipping them. </p> <p>The experience was terrible because I could not make the piece sound, or rather read, the way I wanted it to. The writing fell so far short of the ideas. The characters, who were so vivid inside my head, seemed so stilted when I got them on paper. I finished it, dissatisfied. So was the department: “Style undistinguished,” it noted. A few years ago, when I unearthed the thesis to look up a reference, that impression was confirmed. It reminded me of The Importance of Being Earnest, when Cecily says that the letters she wrote to herself from her imaginary fiancé when she broke off their imaginary engagement were so beautiful and so badly spelled she could not reread them without crying. I felt the same way about my thesis: so beautiful—in intent—and so badly written. Enthusiasm had not been enough; one must also know how to use the language. </p> <p>One learns to write, I have since discovered, in the practice thereof. After seven years’ apprenticeship in journalism I discovered that an essential element for good writing is a good ear. One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose. This, I think, is one of the failings of much American writing. Too many writers do not listen to the sound of their own words. For example, listen to this sentence from the organ of my own discipline, the American Historical Review: “His presentation is not vitiated historically by efforts at expository simplicity.” In one short sentence five long Latin words of four or five syllables each. One has to read it three times over and take time out to think, before one can even make out what it means. </p> <p>In my opinion, short words are always preferable to long ones; the fewer syllables the better, and monosyllables, beautiful and pure like “bread” and “sun” and “grass,” are the best of all. Emerson, using almost entirely one-syllable words, wrote what I believe are among the finest lines in English: </p> <p>By the rude bridge that arched the flood, </p> <p>Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, </p> <p>Here once the embattled farmers stood, </p> <p>And fired the shot heard round the world. </p> <p>Out of twenty-eight words, twenty-four are monosyllables. It is English at its purest, though hardly characteristic of its author. </p> <p>Or take this: </p> <p>On desperate seas long wont to roam, </p> <p>Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, </p> <p>Thy Naiad airs have brought me home </p> <p>To the glory that was Greece, </p> <p>And the grandeur that was Rome. </p> <p>Imagine how it must feel to have composed those lines! Though coming from a writer satisfied with the easy rhythms of “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” they represent, I fear, a fluke. To quote poetry, you will say, is not a fair comparison. True, but what a lesson those stanzas are in the sound of words! What superb use of that magnificent instrument that lies at the command of all of us—the English language. Quite by chance both practitioners in these samples happen to be Americans, and both, curiously enough, writing about history. </p> <p>To write history so as to enthrall the reader and make the subject as captivating and exciting to him as it is to me has been my goal since that initial failure with my thesis. A prerequisite, as I have said, is to be enthralled one’s self and to feel a compulsion to communicate the magic. Communicate to whom? We arrive now at the reader, a person whom I keep constantly in mind. Catherine Drinker Bowen has said that she writes her books with a sign pinned up over her desk asking, “Will the reader turn the page?” </p> <p>The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant—above all, discard the irrelevant—and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said, is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read. To discard the unnecessary requires courage and also extra work, as exemplified by Pascal’s effort to explain an idea to a friend in a letter which rambled on for pages and ended, “I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have time to write you a short one.” The historian is continually being beguiled down fascinating byways and sidetracks. But the art of writing—the test of the artist—is to resist the beguilement and cleave to the subject. </p> <p>Should the historian be an artist? Certainly a conscious art should be part of his equipment. Macaulay describes him as half poet, half philosopher. I do not aspire to either of these heights. I think of myself as a storyteller, a narrator, who deals in true stories, not fiction. The distinction is not one of relative values; it is simply that history interests me more than fiction. I agree with Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century German historian, who said that when he compared the portrait of Louis XI in Scott’s Quentin Durward with the portrait of the same king in the memoirs of Philippe de Comines, Louis’ minister, he found “the truth more interesting and beautiful than the romance.” </p> <p>It was Ranke, too, who set the historian’s task: to find out wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, what really happened, or, literally, how it really was. His goal is one that will remain forever just beyond our grasp for reasons I explained in a “Note on Sources” in The Guns of August (a paragraph that no one ever reads but I think is the best thing in the book). Summarized, the reasons are that we who write about the past were not there. We can never be certain that we have recaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is to stay within the evidence. </p> <p>I do not invent anything, even the weather. One of my readers told me he particularly liked a passage in The Guns which tells how the British Army landed in France and how on that afternoon there was a sound of summer thunder in the air and the sun went down in a blood-red glow. He thought it an artistic touch of doom, but the fact is it was true. --This text refers to the paperback edition.</p> <h3>From the Inside Flap</h3> <p>ful pieces on the historian's role to striking insights into America's past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Here is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent "practicing history." --This text refers to the paperback edition.</p> <h3>From AudioFile</h3> <p>The late Barbara Tuchman departs from longer works to expound upon her experiences as a writer of history. She defines history as "an accidental, perhaps cyclical, record of human conduct." Her rigorous approach to everything she produces becomes apparent in this lengthy essay, which includes public addresses and pieces written for other publications. "I'm very conscious of the reader as a listener," she wrote, well before the advent of audiobooks. Narrator Wanda McCaddon conveys this attitude as she becomes the voice of the author, sounding credible in her command of Tuchman's prodigious vocabulary. McCaddon adds another welcome touch by exploiting her ability to give nuance and personality to prose aptly composed but needing a skillful artist to quicken it. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.</p> <h3>From the Back Cover</h3> <p>Master historian Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. This accessible introduction to the subject of history offers striking insights into American’s past and present, trenchant observations on the international scene, and thoughtful pieces on the historian’s role. --This text refers to the preloaded_digital_audio_player edition.</p></div> <p><strong>Celebrated for bringing a personal touch to history in her Pulitzer Prize–winning epic</strong> The Guns of August <strong>and other classic books, Barbara W. Tuchman reflects on world events and the historian’s craft in these perceptive, essential essays.</strong> </p> <hr /> <p>From thoughtful pieces on the historian’s role to striking insights into America’s past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Spanning more than four decades of writing in <em>The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The Nation,</em> and <em>The Saturday Evening Post,</em> Tuchman weighs in on a range of eclectic topics, from Israel and Mao Tse-tung to a Freudian reading of Woodrow Wilson. This is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent “practicing history.”<br /> <strong><br /> </strong>Praise for** Practicing History </p> <p>“Persuades and enthralls . . . I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history.” <strong>—</strong> Chicago Sun-Times<br /> <strong><br /> “Provocative, consistent, and beautifully readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs.” </strong>—Baltimore<strong> Sun<br /> </strong><br /> “A delight to read.”—The New York Times Book Review</p> <p> <h3>Review</h3><p>"Persuades and Enthralls...I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history." -- Chicago Sun-Times<br /></p><p>"Provocative, Consistent, and Beautifully Readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs." -- The Baltimore Sun </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>From thoughtful pieces on the historian's role to striking insights into America's past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Here is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent "practicing history." </p>

<div> <p><strong>PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—</strong> Newsweek </p> <p style="font-weight: bold">Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time </p> <p>In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages. </p> <p>The Proud Tower, <strong>the Pulitzer Prize–winning</strong> The Guns of August, <strong>and</strong> The Zimmermann Telegram <strong>comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era</strong></p> <h3>Review</h3> <p>“A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’” <strong>—</strong> Newsweek </p> <p>“More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.” <strong>—</strong> Chicago Tribune<br><strong><br>“A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.” </strong>—<strong> The New York Times<br></strong><br>“[ <em>The Guns of August</em> ] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.” <strong>—</strong> The Wall Street Journal</p> <h3>About the Author</h3> <p><strong>Barbara W. Tuchman</strong> (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with <em>The Zimmermann Telegram</em> and international fame with <em>The Guns of August</em> —a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include <em>Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China</em> (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), <em>Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly,</em> and <em>The First Salute</em>.</p> <h3>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</h3> <p>1 </p> <p>A Funeral </p> <p>So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again. </p> <p>In the center of the front row rode the new king, George V, flanked on his left by the Duke of Connaught, the late king’s only surviving brother, and on his right by a personage to whom, acknowledged The Times, “belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,” who “even when relations are most strained has never lost his popularity amongst us”—William II, the German Emperor. Mounted on a gray horse, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British Field Marshal, carrying the baton of that rank, the Kaiser had composed his features behind the famous upturned mustache in an expression “grave even to severity.” Of the several emotions churning his susceptible breast, some hints exist in his letters. “I am proud to call this place my home and to be a member of this royal family,” he wrote home after spending the night in Windsor Castle in the former apartments of his mother. Sentiment and nostalgia induced by these melancholy occasions with his English relatives jostled with pride in his supremacy among the assembled potentates and with a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany’s encirclement; Edward his mother’s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. “He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is!” </p> <p>This verdict, announced by the Kaiser before a dinner of three hundred guests in Berlin in 1907, was occasioned by one of Edward’s continental tours undertaken with clearly diabolical designs at encirclement. He had spent a provocative week in Paris, visited for no good reason the King of Spain (who had just married his niece), and finished with a visit to the King of Italy with obvious intent to seduce him from his Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe, had worked himself into a frenzy ending in another of those comments that had periodically over the past twenty years of his reign shattered the nerves of diplomats. </p> <p>Happily the Encircler was now dead and replaced by George who, the Kaiser told Theodore Roosevelt a few days before the funeral, was “a very nice boy” (of forty-five, six years younger than the Kaiser). “He is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners.” Alongside George, William now rode confidently, saluting as he passed the regimental colors of the 1st Royal Dragoons of which he was honorary colonel. Once he had distributed photographs of himself wearing their uniform with the Delphic inscription written above his signature, “I bide my time.” Today his time had come; he was supreme in Europe. </p> <p>Behind him rode the widowed Queen Alexandra’s two brothers, King Frederick of Denmark and King George of the Hellenes; her nephew, King Haakon of Norway; and three kings who were to lose their thrones: Alfonso of Spain, Manuel of Portugal and, wearing a silk turban, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria who annoyed his fellow sovereigns by calling himself Czar and kept in a chest a Byzantine Emperor’s full regalia, acquired from a theatrical costumer, against the day when he should reassemble the Byzantine dominions beneath his scepter. </p> <p>Dazzled by these “splendidly mounted princes,” as The Times called them, few observers had eyes for the ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man. Despite his great height and perfect horsemanship, Albert, King of the Belgians, who disliked the pomp of royal ceremony, contrived in that company to look both embarrassed and absentminded. He was then thirty-five and had been on the throne barely a year. In later years when his face became known to the world as a symbol of heroism and tragedy, it still always wore that abstracted look, as if his mind were on something else. </p> <p>The future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent, and corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir of the old Emperor Franz Josef, rode on Albert’s right, and on his left another scion who would never reach his throne, Prince Yussuf, heir of the Sultan of Turkey. After the kings came the royal highnesses: Prince Fushimi, brother of the Emperor of Japan; Grand Duke Michael, brother of the Czar of Russia; the Duke of Aosta in bright blue with green plumes, brother of the King of Italy; Prince Carl, brother of the King of Sweden; Prince Henry, consort of the Queen of Holland; and the Crown Princes of Serbia, Rumania, and Montenegro. The last named, Prince Danilo, “an amiable, extremely handsome young man of delightful manners,” resembled the Merry Widow’s lover in more than name, for, to the consternation of British functionaries, he had arrived the night before accompanied by a “charming young lady of great personal attractions” whom he introduced as his wife’s lady in waiting with the explanation that she had come to London to do some shopping. </p> <p>A regiment of minor German royalty followed: rulers of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Waldeck-Pyrmont, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, of Saxony, Hesse, Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria, of whom the last, Crown Prince Rupprecht, was soon to lead a German army in battle. There were a Prince of Siam, a Prince of Persia, five princes of the former French royal house of Orléans, a brother of the Khedive of Egypt wearing a gold-tasseled fez, Prince Tsia-tao of China in an embroidered light-blue gown whose ancient dynasty had two more years to run, and the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, representing the German Navy, of which he was Commander in Chief. Amid all this magnificence were three civilian-coated gentlemen, M. Gaston-Carlin of Switzerland, M. Pichon, Foreign Minister of France, and former President Theodore Roosevelt, special envoy of the United States. </p> <p>Edward, the object of this unprecedented gathering of nations, was often called the “Uncle of Europe,” a title which, insofar as Europe’s ruling houses were meant, could be taken literally. He was the uncle not only of Kaiser Wilhelm but also, through his wife’s sister, the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia, of Czar Nicolas II. His own niece Alix was the Czarina; his daughter Maud was Queen of Norway; another niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain; a third niece, Marie, was soon to be Queen of Rumania. The Danish family of his wife, besides occupying the throne of Denmark, had mothered the Czar of Russia and supplied kings to Greece and Norway. Other relatives, the progeny at various removes of Queen Victoria’s nine sons and daughters, were scattered in abundance throughout the courts of Europe. </p> <p>Yet not family feeling alone nor even the suddenness and shock of Edward’s death—for to public knowledge he had been ill one day and dead the next—accounted for the unexpected flood of condolences at his passing. It was in fact a tribute to Edward’s great gifts as a sociable king which had proved invaluable to his country. In the nine short years of his reign England’s splendid isolation had given way, under pressure, to a series of “understandings” or attachments, but not quite alliances—for England dislikes the definitive—with two old enemies, France and Russia, and one promising new power, Japan. The resulting shift in balance registered itself around the world and affected every state’s relations with every other. Though Edward neither initiated nor influenced his country’s policy, his personal diplomacy helped to make the change possible. </p> <p>Taken as a child to visit France, he had said to Napoleon III: “You have a nice country. I would like to be your son.” This preference for things French, in contrast to or perhaps in protest against his mother’s for the Germanic, lasted, and after her death was put to use. When England, growing edgy over the challenge implicit in Germany’s Naval Program of 1900, decided to patch up old quarrels with France, Edward’s talents as Roi Charmeur smoothed the way. In 1903 he went to Paris, disregarding advice that an official state visit would find a cold welcome. On his arrival the crowds were sullen and silent except for a few taunting cries of “Vivent les Boers!” and “Vive Fashoda!” which the King ignored. To a worried aide who muttered, “The French don’t like us,” he replied, “Why should they?” and continued bowing and smiling from his carriage.</p></div> " More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research." CHICAGO TRIBUNEHistorian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten. <h3>Review</h3> <p>“Fascinating . . . One of the finest works of history written . . . A splendid and glittering performance.”<br /> –_The New York Times<br /> _<br /> “MORE DRAMATIC THAN FICTION . . . A MAGNIFICENT NARRATIVE . . . elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained . . . The product of painstaking and sophisticated research.”<br /> –_Chicago Tribune_<em></em> </p> <p><em></em>“A BRILLIANT PIECE OF MILITARY HISTORY which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’ A writer with an impeccable sense of telling detail, Mrs. Tuchman is able to evoke both the enormous pattern of the tragedy and the minutiae which make it human.”<br /> –_Newsweek_ </p> <p>“[A] BEAUTIFULLY ORGANIZED, COMPELLING NARRATIVE.”<br /> –_San Francisco Chronicle<em></em><br /> <em></em>_<br /> “AN EPIC NEVER FLAGGING IN SUSPENSE . . . It seemed hardly possible that anything new of significance could be said about the prelude to and the first month of World War I. But this is exactly what Mrs. Tuchman has succeeded in doing . . . by transforming the drama’s protagonists as well as its immense supporting cast, from half-legendary and half shadowy figures into full-dimensional, believable persons.”<br /> –_The Christian Science Monitor_ </p> <p>“EXCELLENT . . . [_The Guns of August_] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues.”<br /> –_The Wall Street Journal_<em></em><br /> <em></em> </p> <h3>Product Description</h3> <p>"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."<br /> CHICAGO TRIBUNE<br /> Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten. </p>

<p>Twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author Barbara Tuchman now tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages. Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interersts, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's George III, and the United States' persistent folly in Vietnam. THE MARCH OF FOLLY brings the people, places, and events of history magnificently alive for today's reader.<br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i> Twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author Barbara Tuchman now tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages. Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interersts, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's George III, and the United States' persistent folly in Vietnam. THE MARCH OF FOLLY brings the people, places, and events of history magnificently alive for today's reader. <div> <p>Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government.   Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display.   Praise for The March of Folly   “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review   “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe   “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.”—Chicago Sun-Times</p></div>

<p><strong>The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (</strong> The New York Times <strong>)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of</strong> The Guns of August ** </p> <p><em><em>During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In </em>The Proud Tower,</em> Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. </p> <p>The Proud Tower, <strong><em>* The Guns of August, </em>*and</strong> The Zimmermann Telegram <strong>comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era.</strong></p> <p>"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it."<br>--Barbara W. Tuchman<br>The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.<br>In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the...