Recommendations from our site
“We really live in a golden age of narrative history. Because of the popularizing of history, we began to get back to history as storytelling. Many people give Barbara Tuchman credit for being the person that did that. She was not a professional historian. She was incredibly well-educated and well-read and researched everything you could possibly research, but she wrote it as a story. The historian Margaret Macmillan said that reading Tuchman, when she was a graduate student, was like history going from black-and-white to Technicolor. That’s what narrative history does for you.” Read more...
Best Books for History Reading Groups
Donna McBride, Historian
“For many people, it is the ultimate old-fashioned diplomatic history. But it enthuses me for several reasons. First of all, it’s an extraordinary narrative. It reads magnificently and is a breathtaking horizon of events and people. Secondly, like me, she is obsessed with people. In the first chapter we have the funeral of Edward VII in 1910, which is attended by 10 European kings. She uses this funeral as a way of demonstrating the fundamental contradiction of pre-war Europe, in which increasingly bourgeois, urban, sophisticated industrial societies remained none the less monarchical, with only France as a major Republican power. Militarism and court cultures intermingled to an extraordinary extent.What Tuchman does so well is to document the kind of thought patterns that pervaded the many national rivalries, which was all to do with imperialism, social Darwinism, but, above all, military planning and strategy. Again, what I love about this book, and in this way there’s an affinity between Tuchman and me, is that it describes the importance of irrational forces and charts their implications.” Read more...
The best books on The Dreyfus Affair and the Belle Epoque
Ruth Harris, Historian
Other books by Barbara W Tuchman
Our most recommended books
-
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William Bernstein -
Bolívar: American Liberator
by Marie Arana -
An Officer and a Spy
by Robert Harris -
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
by Alistair Horne -
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
by William Shirer -
Spies: The Secret Showdown Between America and Russia
by Marc Favreau
The book, according to the author