Barbara Wertheim Tuchman

This is a narrative history of the tumultuous years of the American War of Independence, using the salute of the St Eustatius as the starting point in an examination of the rivalries that determined Europe's crucial role in the American struggle.

The First Salute

Joseph Stilwell, military attache to China from 1935 to 1939 and commander of U.S. forces and Allied Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek from 1942 to 1944, was a man who loved China deeply, spoke its language, and knew its people as few Americans ever have. Using the life of Stilwell, Barbara W. Tuchman explores the history of China from the Revolution of 1911 to the turmoil of World War II, when China's Nationalist government faced attack from both Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Her classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the cantankerous but level-headed "Vinegar Joe" is both an account of American relations with China and the experiences of one of our men on the ground. Book jacket.

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

Documents the incidents surrounding a German diplomat's bid for international power that led to America's entry into World War I

The Zimmermann Telegram

"Latter-day history has been content to trace the origins of Britain's Palestine Mandate, based on and incorporating the Balfour Declaration, to the exigencies of the post-World War I period. Barbara Tuchman, in this her first book, originally published in 1956, shows the Declaration and the Mandate to be the almost inevitable product of causes that go much farther back--causes that include a long sequence of gradually evolving motives, religious as well as political. A steady British advance toward the heart of the Middle East had been a historical fact long before Lord Milner observed that it was required by "the imperious necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers," and even before Lord Peel, chairman of the most effective of seventeen Commissions of Inquiry, said of Palestine: "No other problem of our time is so deeply rooted in the past." The inveterate spiritual importance of the Holy Land to England goes back into the misty ages of legend, continues into the centuries of pilgrimages and of the Crusades, and is implicit in the omnipervasive influence of the book that Thomas Huxley called his country's national epic--the English Bible. This is a stirring piece of history, and Mrs. Tuchman tells it, with clarity and insight, in terms of its most vital incidents and personalities."--Dust jacket of reprint edition.

England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

Bible and Sword

From thoughtful pieces on the historian's role to striking insights into America's past and present to trenchant observations on the international scene, Barbara W. Tuchman looks at history in a unique way and draws lessons from what she sees. Here is a splendid body of work, the story of a lifetime spent "practicing history."

Practicing History

Looks at the history of society and culture in the years leading up to World War I.

A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

The Proud Tower

-During the summer of 1972 -- a few short months after Nixon's legendary visit to China -- master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read. Tuchman's observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. The author demonstrates the breadth and scope of her experience in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao's techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman's fascinating essay -If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945- - a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that could have changed the course of postwar history.- - [Back Cover]

Notes from China

"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." CommentaryThe 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

A Distant Mirror

The Calamitous Fourteenth Century

Center for the Book

A Lecture Sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the Authors' League of America, Presented at the Library of Congress October 17, 1979

The Book

Britain and Spain Since 1700

The Lost British Policy

Margaret MacMillan

The Guns of August (1962), a riveting account of the outbreak of World War I and the weeks of fighting leading up to the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. Tuchman dramatizes the diplomatic debacles that precipitated the war and the intransigence of the German and French armies as they dogmatically adhered to their battle plans, with disastrous consequences. Interwoven with her vivid re-creation of the German march through Belgium into France and the fierce fighting on the Eastern Front are astute characterizations of the conflict's key military and political leaders, among them French General Joseph Joffre, German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. The Guns of August can also be read as a cautionary study in the perils of brinksmanship, and Tuchman's searching observations about the irrational escalation of conflict among states made a deep impression on President John F. Kennedy, who famously drew on the book for insight during the Cuban Missile Crisis."--Dust jacket flap.

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman

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