Tuchman was an author of popular history, selling millions of copies. Her clear, dramatic storytelling covered topics as diverse as the 14th century, and World War I.
Tuchman was the author of books which conspired to be more popular than the established classics of the field. Inventing the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor, a history of medieval historians, describes her context or lack thereof.
Partial List of Works
The Lost British Policy: a book about British policy in Spain and the western Mediterranean, 1938
Bible and the Sword:England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour: a book about English involvement in Palestine over the centuries, 1956.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, an overview of 14th Century medieval Europe. A good place to start.
The Guns of August covers the breaking out of World War I. The book that established her reputation despite the fact that the book was little more than a re-telling of 1914 vintage anti-German propaganda.
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author.
Tuchman, daughter of a banker, received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a journalist for a number of years before turning to writing books.
Tuchman was the author of books which conspired to be more popular than the established classics of the field.
Tuchman stresses the importance of smuggling in sustaining the first phases of the conflict, the role and importance of an American naval force and, in the end, the decisive weight of French naval supremacy in the siege of Yorktown.
Tuchman speaks of the 1581 Oath of Abjuration (the Dutch Declaration of Independence), the defeat of the Spanish Armada later in that decade, and the importance of two events in 1609 -- the discovery of the Hudson River ("America's Rhine") and the founding of the Bank of Amsterdam.
Tuchman's family played such a large role in recent American history: her grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., who was President Wilson's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; her uncle served as FDR's secretary of the treasury; and her father, Maurice Wertheim, bought "The Nation" magazine from the pacifist Oswald Garrison Villard.
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