Barbara W Tuchman

During the summer of 1972, a few short months after Nixon’s legendary visit to China, master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first even-handed portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read. Tuchman’s observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party...

Barbara W. Tuchman won her second Pulitzer Prize for this nonfiction masterpiece—an authoritative work of history that recounts the birth of modern China through the eyes of one extraordinary American.
 
General Joseph W. Stilwell was a man who loved China deeply and knew its people as few Americans ever have. Barbara W. Tuchman’s groundbreaking narrative follows Stilwell from the time he arrived in China during...

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague. Barbara Tuchman reveals the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as she examines everything from political assassinations, sea battles, corruption, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, to lawyers,...

For almost three years, President Woodrow Wilson maintained a moral and political neutrality toward World War I, a neutrality that waxed and waned with the flow and consequences of European events. Finally, Wilson had enough. On April 2, 1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and the other Central Powers. Congress obliged. The straw that broke the camel's back was a top secret coded telegram from Germany's foreign minister,...

Looks at the history of society and culture in the years leading up to World War I.

Tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages. Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's...