Word: tuchman
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Graduating from Radcliffe in 1933, Tuchman went to work at the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a liberal organization which included members from all the countries rimming the Pacific. After a one-year stint in New York, Tuchman transferred to the organization's Tokyo branch, where she helped prepare an economic handbook of the Pacific. "The Japanese militarist/fascist movement was getting very hot and IPR wanted to encourage the liberal Japanese who were still holding on," the historian recalls. The situation looked bleak, however, and in 1935. Tuchman came home--via the trans-Siberian rail-road...
...purges and the country was wracked by economic and social chaos. Anxious to hide as much as possible from their foreign travelers. Soviet officials stopped the train at Baiku on the excuse that a log had fallen across the tracks--and held it there for 12 hours. "The result," Tuchman recalls, "was that we hit every station thereafter in the middle of the night--and didn't see anything...
...Tuchman got her only sense of the country from a fierce argument with a Siberian schoolteacher she met on the train. The woman had taught her self English, the two got into a "terrific argument" about "who was better known, Stalin or FDR." As Tuchman recalls, "She thought the Soviets had invented everything--including neon lights...
Returning to New York, Tuchman worked for The Nation for two years, then in 1937 left for Spain to do several stories on the Spanish Civil War. On the trip, Tuchman travelled with Hemingway, his female companion and another male journalist. Tuchman grins slightly as she recalls that Hemingway's companion was very annoyed at her because "there were only two staterooms--and it wasn't proper for me to stay in the same room with either...
Although she only spent one and a half months in Spain, Tuchman observes those six weeks were perhaps the most inspiring of her early years. "[The war] was the great cause of young people in those days--everyone left of center," Tuchman recalls. "You felt that you were engaged in something--you were fighting fascism. When you have a movement like this, life takes on new meaning...