Word: tuchman
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...Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman...
Some of the previous lectures have been writer and poet Robert Penn Warren. Paul Freund, Loeb University Professor Emeritus, novelist Saul Bellow, and historian Barbara Tuchman...
...soon becomes apparent whence Tuchman's own inspiration comes. "Poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians, and sometimes they have given history a push," she writes in her opening piece. Throughout the collection, she turns again and again to poetry, quoting Emerson, Kipling, Longfellow, Tennyson and Poe. In the end she concludes, "What the poets did was to convey the feeling of an episode or a moment of history as they sensed it. The historian's task is rather to tell what happened within discussion of facts...
...Tuchman is not satisfied with this duty; repeatedly she describes her efforts to get a feeling out of the events she narrates. To heighten the reader's suspense, she writes of the time, without using the benefit of hindsight. ("I went back and cut all references but one of the Battle of the Marne, in the chapters leading up to the battle. Though it may seem absurd, I even cut out all references to the ultimate defeat of Germany. I wrote as if I did not know who would win.") An advocate of "corraborative detail," she uncovers and utilizes insignificant...
PRACTICING HISTORY makes no attempt to prove a thesis: a random collection of essays on a random collection of topics, it rambles over almost 50 years. Yet Tuchman is a purist of sorts, and the freshness of her vision shines through. The book is a product of this vision. It speaks eloquently for a brand of history many historians seem to have forgotten...