Historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.
In the dark winter of 1917, as World War I was deadlocked, Britain knew that Europe could be saved only if the United States joined the war. But President Wilson remained unshakable in his neutrality. Then, with a single stroke, the tool to propel America into the war came into a quiet British office. One of countless messages intercepted by the crack team of British decoders, the Zimmermann telegram was a top-secret message from Berlin inviting Mexico to join Japan in an invasion of the United States. Mexico would recover her lost American territories while keeping the U.S. occupied on her side of the Atlantic. How Britain managed to inform America of Germany's plan without revealing that the German codes had been broken makes for an incredible, true story of espionage, intrigue, and international politics as only Barbara W. Tuchman could tell it.
Master historian Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. This accessible introduction to the subject of history offers striking insights into America's past and present, trenchant observations on the international scene, and thoughtful pieces on the historian's role. Here is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent "practicing history."
"A book to celebrate....A delight to read."-New York Times Book Review
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.
From early times the British people have been drawn to the Holy Land through two major influences: the translation of the Bible into English and, later, the imperial need to control the road to India and access to the oil in the Middle East. Under these influences, one cultural and the other political, countless Englishmen—pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, merchants, explorers, and surveyors—have made their way to the land of the ancient Hebrews.
With the lucidity and vividness that characterizes her work, Barbara Tuchman brings to life the development of these twin motives—the Bible and the sword—in the consciousness of the British people, until they were finally brought together at the end of World War I when Britain's conquest of Palestine from the Turks and the solemn moment of entering Jerusalem were imminent. Requiring a gesture of matching significance, that event evoked the Balfour Declaration of 1917, establishing a British-sponsored national home for the modern survivors of the people of the Old Testament.
In her account, first published in 1956, Ms. Tuchman demonstrates that the seeds of today's troubles in the Middle East were planted long before the first efforts at founding a modern state of Israel.
"Barbara Tuchman is a wise and witty writer, a shrewd observer with a lively command of high drama."—Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuchman uses the life of Joseph Stilwell, the military attach' to China in 1935 to 1939 and commander of United States forces and allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942-44, to explore the history of China from the revolution of 1911 to the turmoil of World War II, when China's Nationalist government faced attack from Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Her story is an account of both American relations with China and the experiences of one of our men on the ground.
In The March of Folly, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages. Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's George III, and the United States' persistent folly in Vietnam.
The March of Folly brings the people, places, and events of history magnificently alive for today's reader.
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and best-selling author Barbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland. This compellingly written history presents a fresh, new view of the events that led from the first foreign salute to American nationhood in 1776 to the last campaign of the Revolution five years later. It paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington and recounts in riveting detail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.
“Books are humanity in print.”—Barbara W. Tuchman
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed and how horrible it became. Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914, the month leading up to the war, and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten. Winner of the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award. The 2009 AudioFile Best Voice for History: Wanda McCaddon.
The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague. Barbara Tuchman reveals the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as she examines everything from political assassinations, sea battles, corruption, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, to lawyers, tax collectors, scholars, grocers, knights, and lust and sadism on the stage.
In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden gorgeous blaze of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; the two peace conferences in The Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaurès was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended.
The Bubonic Plague of the 14th century killed one third of all human beings in Europe and Western Asia; many who survived the plague killed each other in the Hundred Years War that followed. What was it like to live in this calamitous century, when knighthood (and much more) died a violent death?
"Two hundred years ago China's imperial rulers sensed a threat to a past-oriented society in the dynamism of the West and tried to frustrate foreign entry."- Foreign Devils ... "Today, one cannot escape the impression that if only it were not for world pressures Maoist China like that of the Ming and the Manchus would be happier if it could withdraw into the broad isolation of the Middle Kingdom." - Ping-Pong ... Just one year after China's long-closed doors reopened to the West in 1971, Barbara Tuchman journeyed through its cities and countryside drawing the human face on this inscrutable giant. "A creative writer's sense of drama and a scholar's obeisance to the evidence." -New York Times
