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Barbara W. Tuchman

Barbara W. Tuchman

  • In this Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Barbara Tuchman explores American relations with China through the experiences of one of our men on the ground. In the cantankerous but level-headed “Vinegar Joe,” Tuchman found a subject who allowed her to perform, in the words of the National Review, “one of the historian’s most envied magic acts: conjoining a fine biography of a man with a fascinating epic story.”

    Joseph Stilwell was the military attaché to China in 1935 to 1939, commander of United States forces, and allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942–44. His story unfolds against the background of China’s history, from the revolution of 1911 to the turmoil of World War II, when China’s Nationalist government faced attack from Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents.

  • Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, distinguished historian, and bestselling author Barbara W. Tuchman finally turns her sights homeward. Here she analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland, demonstrating how the aid of both of these nations made the triumph of American independence possible. She sheds new light on the key role played by the contending navies, paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington, and recounts in riveting detail the decisive campaign of the war at Yorktown. A compellingly written work of history, The First Salute presents a fresh, new view of the events that led from the first foreign salute to American nationhood in 1776 to the last campaign of the Revolution five years later. It brings vividly to life the people and events responsible for the birth of our nation.

  • In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.

    This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.

    Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914, the month leading up to the war, and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome.

    A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.

  • A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August
     
    *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal
     

    The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and the exquisitely decorated Books of Hours; and on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.

    Barbara Tuchman reveals both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived. Here are the guilty passions, loyalties and treacheries, political assassinations, sea battles and sieges, corruption in high places and a yearning for reform, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, and lust and sadism on the stage. Here are proud cardinals, beggars, feminists, university scholars, grocers, bankers, mercenaries, mystics, lawyers and tax collectors, and, dominating all, the knight in his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”

  • The fateful quarter century leading up to World War I was a time when the world of privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of protest was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.”

    The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change to that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.

    Barbara Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy; the anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; two peace conferences in the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized by the death of heroic Jean Jaurès on the night the war began and an epoch ended.