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Barbara Wertheim Tuchman
Born	January 30, 1912(1912-01-30) New York City
Died	February 6, 1989 (aged 77) Greenwich, Connecticut
Occupation	writer, journalist, historian
Nationality	American
Period	Middle Ages, Renaissance, 1900
Genres	historical
Spouse(s)	Dr Lester R. Tuchman
Children	Three daughters
Relative(s)	Maurice Wertheim (father), Henry Morgenthau Sr. (maternal grandfather), Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (maternal uncle), Robert M. Morgenthau (cousin)

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American self-trained historian and author. She became best known for her top-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude and first month of World War I which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

As an author, Tuchman focused on producing popular history. Her clear, dramatic storytelling covered topics as diverse as the 14th century and World War I, and sold millions of copies.

Background

Tuchman was the daughter of the banker Maurice Wertheim, the first cousin of NY district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau and granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau Sr., Woodrow Wilson's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1933.

She married Lester R. Tuchman (b. 1904, d. 1997), an internist, medical researcher and professor of clinical medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in 1939; they had three daughters.^[1]

From 1934 to 1935 she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo, and then began a career as a journalist before turning to books. Tuchman was the editorial assistant of The Nation and an American correspondent of the New Statesman in London, with Far East News Desk and Office of War Information (1934-45).

Tuchman was a trustee of Radcliffe College and a lecturer at Harvard University, University of California, and the U.S. Naval War College. A tower of Currier House, a Harvard College residential dormitory, was named in her honor.

Tuchman's Law

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold. Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.^[2]

Awards

She twice won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, first for The Guns of August and again for Stilwell and the American Experience in China. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Tuchman for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Tuchman's lecture was entitled "Mankind's Better Moments."^[3]

List of works

• The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain since 1700. A book about British policy in Spain and the western Mediterranean, 1938.
• Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour: a book about English involvement in Israel over the centuries, 1956.
• The Zimmermann Telegram: The Zimmermann telegram in early 1917 was a key incident involving Germany and Mexico that helped provoke the USA into entering World War I, 1958
• The Guns of August details the military decisions and actions that occurred leading up to and during the first month of World War I. The book that established her reputation. John F. Kennedy advised the ExComm to read this book during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1962. Reprinted several times in the 1980s as August 1914.
• The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Covers the hesitant rise of U.S. imperialism, anarchist assassinations, socialism and communism and the devolution of the 19th century order in Europe and North America, 1966.
• Stilwell and the American Experience in China: a biography of Joseph Stilwell, 1970.
• Notes from China, a Trip to China, 1972.
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, a comparison and contrast between 14th century and modern Europe. 1978
• Practicing History: Selected essays on historical writing, political ambition, and the importance of reading history. Original essays published between 1935 and 1981. Book published 1981.
• The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam: A meditation on the historical recurrence of governments pursuing policies evidently contrary to their own interests. Focuses on Troy, the Renaissance Popes provoking Protestantism, the British losing their American colonies, and the United States in Vietnam. 1984
• The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution. 1988 (The title "The First Salute" refers to the famous St. Eustatius "flag incident" of 16. Nov. 1778.)

References

External links

• Biography on Kirjasto
• Author's entry on The MacDowell Colony
• Biography on The Jewish Virtual Library
• Bibliographical list on GoogleBooks
• Entry on Distinguished Women

From Wikiquote

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an award-winning American historian and author.

Sourced

Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1970)

• History is the unfolding of miscalculations.
  • p. 132

A Distant Mirror (1978)

• Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
  • p. xix
• That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
  • p. 6
• Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
  • p. 81
• Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
  • p. 123
• Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.
  • p. 141
• The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.
  • p. 173
• When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
  • p. 202
• In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
  • p. 210
• Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
  • p. 213
• When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”
  • p. 239
• Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.
  • p. 273
• What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.
  • p. 291
• For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
  • p. 327
• Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”
  • p. 332
• If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
  • p. 375
• Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
  • p. 389
• To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
  • p. 399
• The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
  • p. 412
• For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
  • p. 426
• His (Deschamps’) complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.
  • p. 450
• In the midst of events there is no perspective.
  • p. 454
• What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?
  • p. 455
• To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.
  • p. 459
• Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
  • p. 469
• Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
  • p. 487
• The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.”
  • p. 490
• If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.
  • Jean Gerson, quoted on p. 520
• Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
  • p. 523
• Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
  • p. 534
• On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he (Sigismund) turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler.
  • p. 542
• Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.
  • p. 554
• When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
  • Admiral Jean de Vienne, quoted on p. 559
• Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.
  • Enguerrand VII de Coucy, quoted on p. 570
• Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.
  • p. 577
• The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
  • p. 581
• As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.
  • p. 585
• The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.
  • p. 590
• The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
  • p. 594

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Barbara Tuchman