Word: tuchman
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...interview conducted last week when Tuchman was in Cambridge to deliver the Atherton lecture, the historian suggested a second reason for her runaway success--an explanation which reveals another dimension to Tuchman's histories, as well as the evolution her work has undergone. That explanation is her use of history as a "distant mirror"--a historic parallel of 20-th century problems...
...August 10, 1914, at the age of two, Tuchman stood on the deck on an Italian liner, and watched two German warships exchange shots with the British cruiser Gloucester on the horizon. The ships soon disappeared, but, as Emerson wrote on another historic occasion, the shots echoed round the world. Although neither Tuchman nor the other passengers knew it at the time, they had just witnessed the opening battle of World...
This sea skirmish eventually reappeared in Tuchman's The Guns of August. The scene is perhaps the 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...