IN LOVE WITH HISTORY
Tuchman, Barbara W.
BOOKS IN LOVE WITH HISTORY PRACTICING HISTORY: SELECTED ESSAYS by Barbara W. Tuchman Alfred A. Knopf. 306 pp. $16.50. n Practicing History, Barbara Tuchman has performed a useful service in...
...The next year she married Lester R. Tuchman, a physician in New York...
...In 1936 he bought The Nation from Oswald Garrison Villard to save it from bankruptcy...
...I believed that the right and the rational would win in the end...
...Tuchman wrote a number of pieces on the American relationship to China and its echoes in Vietnam...
...A combination of archival research and "what if" speculation, it explores why Mao's expressed desire to confer with President Roosevelt in Washington early in 1945 was frustrated by Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley in Chungking, with the connivance of General Albert Wedemeyer...
...This harvest ranges from articles discussing America's entry into World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and various aspects of World War II, the Holocaust, and the emergence of Israel, to sharp criticisms of Henry Kissinger's memoirs and of the ill-starred attempt by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt to psychoanalyze Woodrow Wilson posthumously...
...Once he came to understand the extent of the destruction of European Jewry under Hitler, he would acknowledge in private that he had misread history with respect to Zionism...
...Tuchman terms this "a piece of primary historical research of which I am rather proud...
...One of these—a most intelligent essay, "If Mao Had Come to Washington"—is included in this collection...
...It was followed soon by The Zimmerman Telegram and by her essay, "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead," which is reproduced here...
...After publication of Stilwell in 1971...
...She emphasizes her scorn for sociology, psycho-history, and quantitative history: She has always worked from a narrative and chronological angle of vision...
...One wonders who it was Tuchman really had in mind...
...Uppermost in her mind is a determination to hold the reader's interest...
...Several of the essays reveal much of Tuchman's family background...
...Although Tuchman is correct to insist that history should be written in as inviting a way as possible, it must be said that she displays some naivete in dismissing out of hand a variety of social science approaches that can sometimes lend a more analytical quality to history...
...Marshal Pietro Badoglio had displaced Mussolini as head of Italy's first post-Fascist government from July 1943 to June 1944 and was living quietly in retirement thereafter until his death in 1956...
...But she adds wistfully that "to manage better next time is within our means...
...to anticipate does not seem to be...
...The collection will be of interest to a broad spectrum of readers who have admired her two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, The Guns of August (1962) and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), as well as such other studies as The Zimmerman Telegram (1958), The Proud Tower (1966), and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978...
...In the1 first,"The Craft," Tuchman discusses "the historian as artist," "the historian's opportunity," "biography as a prism of history," and other topics of a historiographical nature...
...But this is a pardonable oversight in a collection of essays that is impressive by any standard and that will stand as a tribute to a distinguished writer...
...Barbara Tuchman's father was Maurice Wertheim, a banker with varied interests...
...I think of myself as a child of the 1930s," she now recalls...
...Unfortunately, it made one minor error of fact: She suggests that on the eve of the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt was preoccupied with a number of crises, including the "arrest of Badoglio...
...The editor, Freda Kirchwey, put Barbara to work writing on contemporary themes...
...The Nation sent the young writer to Valencia and Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War...
...The second block of the collection is subtitled "The Yield...
...Nothing appears in this collection from the 1940s through the last half of the 1950s, because of the dispersal of Tuchman's OWI files and her new responsibilities as the mother of small children...
...I was a believer then...
...Charles F. Delzell (Charles F. Delzell is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University...
...While she doubts that there are meaningful patterns to history, she suggests that we can use history to avoid past mistakes and to manage better in similar circumstances next time, and also to anticipate the course of events...
...In the last cluster of essays, "Learning from History," Tuchman makes it clear that she has no illusions about such "lessons...
...Nevertheless, his actions as ambassador helped save the lives of thousands of Jews in Palestine—and Armenian Christians, too—so that in a sense he helped to make possible a future state of Israel...
...While he was in the Army Medical Corps she spent several years with the Office of War Information in New York, trying to explain to European listeners of OWI broadcasts the Pacific conflict and the American effort in that theater...
...She stresses the role of individuals and underscores the unpredictable nature of history...
...In 1948 she started work on her first book, Bible and Sword, which was published in 1956...
...Tuchman is not a trained historian...
...There she found herself caught up in the frenzy of the anti-fascism crusade...
...The fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939 caused her illusions to be replaced by the recognition of realpolitik, "the beginning of [my] adulthood...
...The collection is in three parts...
...This is especially true of "The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," which ranges over the work of her maternal grandfather, New Yorker Henry L. Morgenthau Sr., the son of a German-Jewish immigrant...
...n Practicing History, Barbara Tuchman has performed a useful service in bringing together thirty-three of her most incisive essays, addresses, and shorter pieces written since the 1930s...
...She had graduated from Radcliffe three years earlier and had spent 1934-1935 in Tokyo with the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, for which she helped compile an economic handbook on the Pacific...
...Morgenthau was named by President Wilson to be ambassador to Turkey before the United States entered World War I. A strong believer in Jewish assimilation in the West, in 1921 he publicly proclaimed his opposition to Zionism...
...she learned the necessary skills on her own, a fact which may account for the almost breathless excitement she conveys in sharing the research and writing techniques she has found most useful...
...Morgenthau died at the age of ninety-one, just a year before the founding of the new state...
...It was at this time that she covered at second hand General Stilwell's campaign in Burma—a subject which some twenty years later would lead to her biography of this vinegary critic of Chiang Kai-shek...
Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1
