Word: tuchman
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...TUCHMAN'S TALENT FOR bringing historic episodes into sharp, dramatic focus has few rivals among modern writers. The words James Thurber once wrote of E.B. White could apply to Tuchman too: her sentences are "silver and crystal"; her ear "not only notes the louder cosmic rhythms, but catches the faintest ticking sounds...
...later essay, entitled "Is History a Guide to the Future?," Tuchman returns to this theme, calling man the "Unknown Variable" and comparing the "large organizing idea" to an iron chain mat pulled behind a tractor to smooth out a plowed field...
...alternative to this brand of historiography, Tuchman offers narration--and what she calls "history by the ounce." A historian should focus on a particular event and collect all of the evidence relating to it. "We can never be certain that we have recaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is stay within the evidence." Often in this process of arranging the facts in narrative form, a theory or historical generalization will emerge of its own accord. It may be a modest one, she admits, "but my size...
...root of Tuchman's debate with the "genus Toynbee," is their fundamental difference in philosophy: "I am a disciple of the ounce," Tuchman writes...
...collected essays place keys to Tuchman's skill as on or best in the context of her intellectual growth. Tracing her own inspiration to one professor of history and two of literature, Tuchman recalls that their common characteristic wan an unbounded, almost torrential zeal for knowledge. (Of the historian, a classicist and anti-romantic, she writes: "His contempt for zeal was so zealous, so vigorous and learned, pouring out in a great organ fugue of erudition, that it amounted to enthusiasm in the end.") Passionate fervor, Tuchman observes, is one quality indispensable to a good historian; the other is ability...