We Need Barbara
Few writers have exerted a greater influence on my worldview than the late Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989). If you are not familiar with Ms. Tuchman, she was an American historian and journalist from the now lost tradition of patrician service and responsibility. Born to wealth and privilege, Ms. Tuchman was surrounded by power - and service - from infancy. Her family included bankers, ambassadors and cabinet members.
From her earliest childhood, she was fascinated by people, by the society in which she lived, and how that society had come about. Education - formal, informal, experiential - was her lifelong passion. She achieved commerical and critical fame in the heyday of the Cold War with accessible and cautionary works that reached far beyond academia into mainstream popularity.
Her most famous work, The Guns of August (1962), entered the public conciousness on the heels of the Cuban Missle Crisis, a time when Americans and the rest of the world had come to realize that apocalyptic catastrophe lay not with nations, but in the hands of a few individuals with their "fingers on the button." Her book charted the decisions, people and society that spawned World War I - which remains the formative event of our modern world. Nearly everything about the world you know and live in today was shaped and created by The Great War of a century ago.
If you have not read the Guns of August, I strongly encourage you to do so. Whether or not you enjoy history for history's sake, you will gain a tremendous insight into how power, ignorance, passion, and ideas worth dying for can lead to unspeakable tragedy. If you want to truly understand the Cold War, Vietnam, the unending turmoil of the Middle East and 9/11, read this book. By the way, you will also simply enjoy the work of a master craftsman, an historian at the height of her powers. For those of you who don't like to read, you can see an excellent film version of the book on You Tube at the link below. Perhaps pirated, but excellent nonetheless.
For those of you interested in the medieval world, read A Distant Mirror (1978). This book seeks to understand the culminating decades of the so called Dark Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance through the history of one noble family. Through this work, you will see how our world today is not so terribly different - not at core - than the world then. We as people are much the same, and our tribal, cultural and social concerns are more similar than you'd expect.
In the end, though, it was not her merits as an historian, but Ms. Tuchman's ability to unravel complexity and to dispel myth - in ways both entertaining and accessible to the reader - that most influenced me. She remains one of my personal heroes, a person who helped shape my own goals and approach to nearly everything I do. She taught me that nothing exists in isolation, and that nothing can be understood, changed or influenced without a deep appreciation for what - and why - it really is what it is. Barabara Tuchman, American historian and magnificent educator.
We could use her now!
