Word: tuchman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Originally, Tuchman was intended to carry the story through 1943--through the years of the British mandate, the Arab-Israel war, and the final re-establishment of Israel. She spent six months of research on the history of these bitter last 30 years but, as she later explained. "When I tried to write this as history, I could not do it. Anger, disgust, and a sense of injustice can make some write eloquent and evoke brilliant polemic, but the emotions stunted and twisted my pen." This lesson has remained with her throughout her work...
...scrupulously avoids writing 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...
...perhaps in her most recent history, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, that Tuchman's parallel is most explicit. "The Bomb is very much a factor in everyone's mind," she says, "and I wanted to find out what was the effect on society of a massive destructive force." Tuchman had originally intended to focus the book on the Black Death," the most lethal disaster in recorded history" which ---between 1308 and 1350--killed an estimated one-third of the population living between India and Ireland. The book eventually expanded to cover the entire century, a period when "assumptions...
...address to the Chicago Historical Society, Tuchman observed...
...Since Tuchman, the humanist, spoke these words, her philosophy, of history has gradually evolved to a place more and more emphasis on the second dimension of her theory. Half a century ago she saw institutions destroyed in Japan and Stalinist Russia, and watched idealism self-distract in the country side of Civil War-torn Spain. In the last 15 years--she has seen the Vietnam War. Watergate and the atom bomb trigger the same reactions in the United States, she has with increasing frequency turned to history for answers. Although she still retains her humanistic vision, she has gradually focused...