The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I
(Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best non...)
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Guns of August, and The Zimmerman Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchmans classic histories of the First World War era
In this landmark, Pulitzer Prizewinning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the wars key players, Tuchmans magnum opus is a classic for the ages.
Praise for The Guns of August
A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchills statement that the first month of World War I was a drama never surpassed.Newsweek
More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrativebeautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.Chicago Tribune
A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.The New York Times
The Guns of August has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.The Wall Street Journal
From the Trade Paperback edition.
(The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Guns of A...)
The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchmans classic histories of the First World War era
In January 1917, the war in Europe was, at best, a tragic standoff. Britain knew that all was lost unless the United States joined the war, but President Wilson was unshakable in his neutrality. At just this moment, a crack team of British decoders in a quiet office known as Room 40 intercepted a document that would change history. The Zimmermann telegram was a top-secret message to the president of Mexico, inviting him to join Germany and Japan in an invasion of the United States. How Britain managed to inform the American government without revealing that the German codes had been broken makes for an incredible story of espionage and intrigue as only Barbara W. Tuchman could tell it.
Praise for The Zimmermann Telegram
A true, lucid thriller . . . a tremendous tale of hushed and unhushed uproars in the linked fields of war and diplomacy . . . Tuchman makes the most of it with a creative writers sense of drama and a scholars obeisance to the evidence.The New York Times
The tale has most of the ingredients of an Eric Ambler spy thriller.Saturday Review
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
(THE PROUD TOWER by Barbara Tuchman examines the Western W...)
THE PROUD TOWER by Barbara Tuchman examines the Western World of approximately 100 years ago. Technologically the world was a very different from today, but the strifes between economic groups and among nations bears many similarities to our own time. Tuchman examines the economic, social, political, and technological world of the period 1890-1914. By this period, the United States had become an important player in world affairs. The Haymarket Affair in Chicago fueled the development of international anarchism which led to the assasinations of political figures in Russia, Italy, France and lastly President McKinley in the United States. Recommended in Laura Berquist U.S. History Geography and American Literature Author: Barbara W. TuchmanFormat: 544 pages, PaperbackPublisher: Ballantine Books 1st Ballantine Books edition (August 27, 1996) ISBN: 978-0345405012
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour
(With the lucidity and vividness that characterize all her...)
With the lucidity and vividness that characterize all her work, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Barbara Tuchman, explores the complex relationship of Britain to Palestine that led to the founding of the modern Jewish state--and to many of the problems that plague the Middle East today.
"Barbara Tuchman is a wise and witty writer, a shrewd observer with a lively command of high drama."
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and journalist.
Background
Barbara Tuchman was born in New York City, United States on January 30, 1912, the daughter of Maurice and Alma (Morganthau) Wertheim. The Wertheim family was wealthy and had a tradition of interest in public affairs. Barbara's maternal grandfather was Henry Morganthau, Sr. , a banker and American ambassador to Turkey during President Wilson's administration, and her uncle, Henry Morganthau, Jr. , was Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury. Barbara's father was a banker and a publisher as well as having many outside interests, including founding the Theatre Guild and serving as president of the American Jewish Committee.
Education
Barbara attended private schools in New York and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933. Her early interest in history is shown by her honors thesis, "The Moral Justification of the British Empire. " Although one of the professors she admired most at Radcliffe was the noted historian C. H. Mcllliwain, he did not supervise her thesis. Instead, it was supervised by an English tutor who was little interested in the topic. Barbara did not pursue an advanced degree in history; her formal education in the topic ended in 1933. Her informal education, however, continued.
She got honorary doctorates in literature from Yale, Columbia, Bates, New York University, Williams, and Smith.
Career
After graduation from Radcliffe she accompanied her grandfather to the World Economic Conference in London, where she observed economists and statesmen attempting to end the world-wide depression. When she returned from Europe she began her working career as an unpaid research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1934. The following year she went to Tokyo for the institute as an editorial assistant, a raise in rank but not in pay. While working in Tokyo she sold her first article and embarked on a journalistic career.
Returning to the United States in 1936, she became an editorial assistant at The Nation, which her father had purchased from Oswald Garrison Villard. The following year she went to Spain to cover the civil war for the journal. Sympathetic to the Republican cause, she then became a staff writer for War in Spain, a publication subsidized by the Spanish government, in London from 1937 to 1938. During this same time she put together a very slim book entitled The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain Since 1700 (1938). The book, which was a rapid survey of relationships between the two nations, argued for British involvement in the current affairs of Spain.
Next, Tuchman became the American correspondent for the New Statesmen and Nation for a year before returning to New York City.
When World War II started and her husband enlisted in the Medical Corps, Tuchman followed him to Fort Rucker, Alabama. When he went overseas, she returned to work. From 1943 to 1945 she held a position on the Far East desk of the Office of War Information (OWI) utilizing her experiences with the Institute of Pacific Relations. When the war ended she returned to domestic life.
In 1948 she began work on her first major book, stimulated by events in the Middle East. Eight years later it appeared. The book, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956), took the position that the Balfour Declaration providing a homeland for the Jews was a logical extension of British tradition. The book, like her first one, was a survey showing much breadth but little depth.
Her next book, The Zimmerman Telegram (1958), was quite different. It was an historical monograph which intensively analyzed the events and forces surrounding the cable which helped turn American public opinion against the German cause in World War I. The following year Tuchman began research on the book that made her famous. In August she toured Belgium and France in order to learn the terrain where the first fighting of World War I had occurred. Her intensively researched The Guns of August (1962) presented the events leading to World War I to a mass audience. She then wrote a description of the Belle Epoque (1900 - 1914), the period just prior to the war, which was published under the title The Proud Tower (1966).
Her next major book switched locales from Europe to Asia and from World War I to World War II. Utilizing her experiences in the Orient and with OWI, she wrote Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971). It, too, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Her later books did not cover the same ground. Her Notes on China (1972) was a slim, journalistic volume. It was followed by A Distant Mirror (1978), an historical account of events in 14th-century France. In 1981 she published a collection of lectures and articles given over the years under the title of Practicing History, and in 1984 she wrote The March of Folly (1984), which compared the errors in judgment made by the Pope in the Reformation, the British in the American Revolution, and the United States in Vietnam.
At the time of her stroke and death in February, 1989 at the age of 77, her last book, The First Salute (about the American Revolution) had been on the New York Times best seller list for 17 weeks.
Sympathetic to the Republican cause, she then became a staff writer for War in Spain, a publication subsidized by the Spanish government, in London from 1937 to 1938.
From 1943 to 1945 she held a position on the Far East desk of the Office of War Information (OWI) utilizing her experiences with the Institute of Pacific Relations.
Membership
She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Connections
On June 18, 1940, she married Lester R. Tuchman, a physician who was to become the president of the medical board of City Hospital in Queens. Barbara Tuchman began a domestic life and started a family which consisted of three daughters-Lucy, Jessica, and Alma.