Barbara W. Tuchman

American historian

• Born: January 30, 1912
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 6, 1989
• Place of death: Greenwich, Connecticut

Recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes in history and one of the most widely read American historians, Tuchman helped reintroduce history as an art to the reading public.

Early Life

Barbara W. Tuchman (TUHK-mehn) would later recall having witnessed the first naval engagement of World War I when she was two years old. The event occurred in the Mediterranean as she traveled with her parents to visit her grandfather, who was then serving as U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Her historical interests never wavered afterward, although they were reinforced during her childhood by the popular historical adventures recounted in Lucy Fitch Perkins’s famous Twins series, as well as in books of the same genre by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Porter, Alexandre Dumas, père, and George Alfred Henty. Her interests in place, imaginative research, and confident writing, however, required years of apprenticeship.

Tuchman’s early background was marked by privilege and familial distinction. Maurice Wertheim, her father, was a leader in New York City’s Jewish community, a successful international banker, publisher, and philanthropist. Her mother, Alma Morgenthau Wertheim, was a member of the prominent Morgenthau banking family. It was Henry Morgenthau, businessman turned diplomat, whom Tuchman had been en route to see when elements of the British fleet attempted to intercept Germany’s Goeben in August, 1914 one of the world’s most memorable months, encapsulating the meltdown of a civilization whose ambience Tuchman later re-created in The Guns of August (1962). An uncle, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury, while cousin Robert Morgenthau gained repute as a U.S. federal attorney.

Tuchman’s formal education comported with her family’s expectations and achievements: New York’s Walden School and then, in 1929, Harvard’s affiliate, Radcliffe College for women. In essays written decades later, she recalled the influences of Irving Babbitt, a specialist in French literature; Charles McIlwain, himself a Pulitzer Prize winner for a historical study of American government; and John Livingston Lowe, an expert in comparative literature. Equally as memorable, she recounted, was her freedom to spend time in the magnificent stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, repository of one of the world’s largest private book and manuscript collections. Meanwhile, her summers were spent with her family in Europe. Shortly after graduation, she joined her grandfather at the World Economic Conference of 1933.

Privileged as she was, Tuchman eagerly transmuted social advantage into cultivating her splendid background and temperament for historical writing. She commenced formal research working for the Institute of Pacific Relations soon after graduation. In 1935, she joined the staff of The Nation, which her father owned, writing on a variety of newsworthy subjects. The magazine dispatched her to Spain for coverage of that country’s confused and savage civil war in 1937. On her return, she determined to work as a freelance correspondent for a British news journal. In the meantime, she witnessed the publication of her first book, The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain Since 1700 (1938), the precursor to eleven significantly better works.

Life’s Work

As for everyone of her generation and age, war and family for a time preempted Tuchman’s other affairs. In 1940, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, and the year before America’s direct involvement, she married the president of New York City Hospital’s medical board, Dr. Lester Tuchman. In the acknowledgments of her final work, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (1988), she not only thanked him for aiding her with her failing eyesight but also acknowledged him as being “the rock upon which this house is built.” From 1943 until 1945, both Tuchmans performed national service, she at the Far Eastern Office of the Office of War Information. Some of Tuchman’s initial curiosities about life in the Far East, subsequently fleshed out in her Stilwell and the American Experience in China,1911-1945 (1971), took shape.

Despite these early publications, her “first” book, as she described it, did not appear until 1956 Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour , a study of British policy in Palestine. It was, by her own admission, incomplete. The last six months of her research dealing with events from 1918 until 1948, a period of British Mandate over Palestine, of Arab uprisings, the Arab-Israeli War, and reestablishment of the state of Israel in 1948, so overwhelmed her with a sense of disgust and injustice that, contrary to her editor’s wishes, she destroyed them. Her emotions had victimized her perception of scholarly discipline. The study thus ended in 1918. The lesson this experience conveyed to her persisted: Stay within the evidence and let the emotions come to the readers insofar as possible from the presentation itself.

In this regard, Tuchman readdressed an earlier canon of major historians, which had been eclipsed somewhat by historical writing like that of the distinguished and enormously influential Charles A. Beard. Beard and historian Mary Ritter Beard, in company with James Harvey Robinson and other Progressives, conceived of history as an important force in effecting social change, of molding civilization. They wrote the “New History,” which questioned the older standard of objectivity, and their works raised their banners around the qualified relativism that became the trademark of their school.

Tuchman agreed that the goal of absolute objectivity was unattainable by historians. Nevertheless, in essays explaining her philosophy of history, she placed herself in the tradition of German historian Leopold von Ranke, the figure generally credited with founding the modern school of objective historiography known as Scientific History. Inserting one’s opinions into the hunchwork guiding research, as well as imposing these opinions on one’s selection of materials for writing, she believed, was highly undesirable. Rather, self-conscious striving for objectivity, recording history “how it really was,” as Ranke stated it, was Tuchman’s goal. Thus, for the most part, contemporary history evaluations of headline events of her own day or of recent decades by choice lay outside her intellectual bailiwick. Such events were too immediate and too emotion-charged for her to analyze calmly and reflectively.

In a few essays, Tuchman did indeed ignore these tenets, but not in her major works. Bible and Sword thus closed in 1918; The Zimmermann Telegram (1958), The Guns of August (1962), and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966) all focused on events and personalities of World War I. Stilwell and the American Experience in China examined occurrences from which the passage of a full generation buffered her. Likewise, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) focused on the excitement and upheaval of a distant European past, and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984) sketched the timeless absurdities of warfare, while her last book, The First Salute (1988), assessed the impact of foreign involvement on the American Revolution. She agreed that contemporary history could be written, citing William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) as a superior example, but not by her.

Musing further on her own historical approach and style, Tuchman emphasized her distaste for history “in gallon jugs.” By that she meant history wrestled into the service of a historian’s grand explanatory or philosophical schemes, and therefore girdled with sweeping generalizations. The historian who after 1934 and through the 1960’s had most recently fit this description was the English historian Arnold Toynbee, whose A Study of History (1934-1964), a twelve-volume theoretical analysis of the rise and decline of more than a score of notable civilizations, had proved surprisingly popular, particularly as made accessible to general audiences in excellent abridgments. For Tuchman, however, climbing “those Toynbeean heights” would have required her to soar from the ground impelled by theories of her own invention. That sort of endeavor, as she saw it, was not for the historian. Besides, however grand the view from a Toynbeean perspective, Tuchman lamented the inevitable disappearance of detail.

It was indeed an eye for telling detail that characterized Tuchman’s histories in her words, “corroborative detail.” Such detail, she insisted, restrained historians and forced them to adhere to as much truth as could be gleaned from their materials. It was her view that while corroborative detail might not produce glittering generalizations, it still might reveal historical truths in addition to keeping research anchored in reality.

Tuchman’s final work came in 1988. The First Salute was published some months before her death at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in February of 1989.

Significance

With the lengthy experience in research and writing that she had begun acquiring in her youth and with a firm grasp of the tenets of professional history, Tuchman made straightforward narrative history her genre. She embellished it with brilliantly selected detail one of her trademarks that made events and personalities vital for her readers. When she began her major works, narrative history was out of fashion, particularly in academia, and interpretive history seemed the route to reputation. Worse, as far as many academics were concerned, much of the best narrative history, and certainly the most readable with notable exceptions had been produced by nonacademics.

Despite the authority of academic historians, which had grown with the expansion of American universities, mass education, and the importance of the doctoral degree beginning in the 1950’s, Tuchman chose an alternate course for herself. She earned no higher degrees, and she was faintly bemused by the overwhelmingly male-dominated mandarinate represented by academic historians. She certainly respected the standards that academics had set for the collection and accuracy of their research. Yet, academics essentially wrote for one another. To the extent that this was the case, historical writing became a busy closet enterprise to which reading publics were not privy. Tuchman consciously returned to the older tradition of history, writing “objective” narrative with literary merit a tradition that had included such notables as Allan Nevins, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Douglas Southall Freeman, all of whom urged that while history should be judged by rigorous standards of accuracy it should also join hands with literature. Capitalizing on this advice and following her own artistic predilections, Tuchman became one of the most widely read of modern American historians. A best-selling author, she was an important figure in reviving history for the public. Two Pulitzer Prizes are testimonials to the high abilities she brought to bear in scholarly realms that into the 1990’s were still overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Bibliography

“Barbara Tuchman.” The Nation, March, 1989, 252-253. A thoughtful, laudatory obituary by a periodical with which Tuchman was associated when she began her writing and research career, and one in which her family had owned an interest. This profile is valuable because while Tuchman’s books were widely reviewed, there are few published materials about their author.

Beard, Mary Ritter. Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities. New York: Macmillan, 1946. Beard, who has been perceived as a founder of women’s history and a champion of women writing history, was greatly admired by Tuchman. Neither Beard nor Tuchman fit into the academic historical guilds of their times. Brief annotated bibliography and useful index.

Hurwitz, Samuel T. “The Guns of August: Review.” American Historical Review 7 (July, 1962): 1014-1015. Valuable as an appreciative academic review of Tuchman’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning work. It credits Tuchman with vivid, imaginative, and passionate writing. It describes the work as a series of vignettes offering little new to professional specialists, but serving as a good example of how history can be written to appeal to a wide audience.

Marcus, Jacob R. The American Jewish Woman, 1654-1980. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1981. Briefly places Tuchman as a member of the Morgenthau-Wertheim families in context with other notable Jewish women of her generation.

Neal, Steve. Rolling on the River: The Best of Steve Neal. Carbondale: Southern University Press, 1999. This collection of writings by Neal, a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, includes a piece about Tuchman and her work.

Tuchman, Barbara W. Practicing History: Selected Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. A collection of frank, often charming commentaries and examples of Tuchman’s work and views from her articles or lectures. Few notes, no bibliography or index. Her historical views should be juxtaposed to those male academic historians who reviewed her work. On balance they credited her with striking prose and good “popular” history, making clear that it was less thoroughly researched, profound, or interdisciplinary than they expected “reliable” history to be.

Yoder, Edwin M. The Historical Present: Uses and Abuses of the Past. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Includes the chapter “Barbara Tuchman and the Horseshoe Nails of History.”

Zinsser, Judith P. History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full. New York: Twayne, 1993. A clear, cogent survey and comparative analysis of men’s history, women’s history, and the impact of feminism on each. Useful for placing Tuchman in the broader modern context of women writing history. An excellent work with annotated suggestions for further reading and a valuable index.