Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...write her first book until she was nearly 45, the historian has received two Pulitzer prizes as well as plaudits from scholars around the world. Unlike most historians who generally publish variations on a theme, the subjects of her books have ranged from ancient Palestine to medieval Europe and 20th-century China. Finally, her books have been uniformly successful--and several have been massive best sellers...
...closest she ever comes to merging her personal experiences and her writing, and the convergence is strangely appropriate. For though Tuchman scarcely remembers the event, those shots--and others fired later that day--fundamentally shaped her life and work. As Tuchman her self observes. "That's when the 20th century really began...
...though history is Tuchman's medium, the current century is her philosophic obsession. Born into a world of hope and self-confidence, she watched the idealism of the 19th century dissolve in war and recongeal into the recrimination and self doubt of the 20th. In contrast to the proud and noble self-image of the Victorian man, "our self-image looks more like Woody Allen or a character from Samuel Beckett," Tuchman declared in her 1980 Jefferson lecture. "It is a paradox of our time in the West that never have so many people been so relatively well...
...personal level, Tuchman's early years gave her a first-hand view of this 20th-century disillusionment by bringing her time and time again into contact with the forces and events that shaped the century...
...about contemporary events. Tuchman admits that she often looks for mirrors of the present in the past and frequently chooses her subjects because of their current significance. The Guns of August, she says, arose because "I felt I had to do something on 1914, since that's when the 20th century really began." Finishing that, she turned to The Proud Tower because "I realized that the cause of World War I was not really in the diplomatic correspondence of 1913 and 1914, but the social forces of the decades before that "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which...