Landon Lecture | Barbara Tuchman

Recorded: September 8, 1988
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) was best known for her works on 20th-century wars although she also wrote on 14th-century France.
Barbara Tuchman was born in New York City 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.
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) won her a Pulitzer Prize and 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.
Along the way she accumulated many honors, including honorary doctorates in literature from Yale, Columbia, Bates, New York University, Williams, and Smith. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which elected her president in 1978-1980 and awarded her the Gold Medal for History in 1978. In addition, Belgium inducted her into the Order of Leopold first class.
Tuchman's writings are noted for attention to detail and colorful style. The author was most interested in the human element in history and, consequently, emphasized biographical data even in works devoted to the coming and waging of war. She practiced narrative history in the tradition of Ranke, whose motto--to tell history as it is--she took for her own.