Barbara Tuchman

Instead of having linear concepts or cyclical views of history, what if there was another way to look at our past? Barbara Tuchman was an American historian and best-selling writer whose theory of history is atypical compared to most historians. Barbara emphasized that history was like painting a portrait with every factual detail at hand essential to finishing the piece. Throughout her time as a successful writer she coined the term not “to instruct but to tell a story.” This quote goes hand in hand with Barbara’s theory of history; She strongly believes that history should be considered an art rather than a science. Barbara Tuchman was born as Barbara Wertheim on January 30th, 1912 in New York City. She came from a wealthy and proper family.…

CPO 2001-7383 In Barbara Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August, arguably one of the most important events mentioned is the decline of the Ottoman Empire. While Tuchman spends very little time detailing the decline itself, she does acknowledge that the Ottoman Empire was, going into World War I, the “Sick Man” of Europe. What would prove to be the end of the Ottoman Empire was siding with Germany and consequentially the former Ottoman Empire was divided into separate mandates by the Allied Powers.…

Stubborn, headstrong, adamant and rigid, all synonyms for one term: Wooden- headedness. This phenomenon shows up multiple times throughout human history and has single handedly changed the world in many ways. Wooden-headedness is something that affects all factors of life, and in historian Barbara Tuchman’s piece March of Folly she correctly identifies its prevalence in human actions and decisions. America during the 50s was an era of wooden-headedness. This was a time when communists were…

goes against their morals. This theory is something that truly does happen in humans, as can be seen in the Milgram experiment. In this experiment, subjects were observed to continually give another human an increasingly painful electric shock, eventually surpassing lethal levels, simply because a person with higher power continually told them to. This obedience to higher-ups can be very dangerous when those higher-ups have delusional, or even evil ideals. Barbara Tuchman is an author who wrote…

“When the gap between the ideal and the real becomes too wide, the system breaks the down,” (Barbara Tuchman). What does it mean to be ideal, or to be real? Why must the gap between them be fine or the system will break? In Barbara Tuchman’s quote, she refers to the “ideal” as the rich, and the “real” as the poor of a society. This quote is accurate because people of a union must work together as a whole in order to achieve the best for their society, or else they will fall apart, and this can…

Barbara Tuchman 's "The Plague" (rpt. In Santi V. Buscemi and Charlotte Smith, 75 Readings Plus 10th ed. [New York: McGraw Hill, 2013] 32-44) recaptures approximately every significant detail of the sinister disease, formally known as the Bubonic Plague or The Black Death that attacked the world in the mid 14th century. Unlike common infirmities found in the 21st era, such as AIDS or HIV, the bubonic plague killed nearly one-third of the earth 's population in five short years. What makes this…

This is a historical narrative by Barbara Tuchman, where she presents in graphic detail about the outbreak of the ‘black death’ during the Late Middle Ages (1347 – 1352) and its progression through Europe. The ‘black death’ was the disease known as the bubonic plague and manifested in two forms. As Tuchman explains, the first form infected the bloodstream, causing buboes and internal bleeding, which was spread by contact; the second one was a more virulent pneumonia - type that infected the…

Imagine coming across a ship that came into port with sailors either dead or on the verge of death. These men are in immense pain and have black swellings about the size of eggs and apple size swells in the armpits and groin; these swells oozing and dripping with blood and pus. You would have just crossed somebody with the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. In Barbara Tuchman’s “This Is the End of the World: The Black Death”, she explains what the bubonic plague is and what effects…

“If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality”-Roopleen. This quote relates to both Ben Carson and Taylor Greene from The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver during their journey on accomplishing their goals. Gifted hands by Ben Carson is an aspiring story of how he started from Detroit and made his way to be an astounding pediatric neurosurgeon at John Hopkins by the age of thirty-three and never seemed…

In the book Anthem by Ayn Rand, Equality 7-2521 is a young man who struggles to find ways to show his true self because he lives in a society based on conformity. Ayn Rand uses the symbols of the light bulb, the Uncharted Forest, and his new name to demonstrate the conflict of individuality versus conformity in order to demonstrate the importance of individuality and self-discovery. Thus, through the use of these symbols, Ayn Rand is able to integrate the theme of individuality versus conformity…