Publisher Description

Celebrated for bringing a personal touch to history in her Pulitzer Prize–winning epic The Guns of August and other classic books, Barbara W. Tuchman reflects on world events and the historian's craft in these perceptive, essential essays.
 
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 The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, The Nation, and The Saturday Evening Post, 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."
 
Praise for Practicing History
 
"Persuades and enthralls . . . I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history."—Chicago Sun-Times
 
"Provocative, consistent, and beautifully readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs."—Baltimore Sun
 
"A delight to read."—The New York Times Book Review

Author Biography

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August—a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute.

Review

"Persuades and enthralls . . . I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history."—Chicago Sun-Times
 
"Provocative, consistent, and beautifully readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs."—Baltimore Sun
 
"A delight to read."—The New York Times Book Review

Review Quote

"Persuades and Enthralls...I can think of no better primer for the nonexpert who wishes to learn history." -- Chicago Sun-Times "Provocative, Consistent, and Beautifully Readable, an event not to be missed by history buffs." -- The Baltimore Sun

Excerpt from Book

I The Craft In Search of History 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. 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 ch'teaux 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 fianc

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