An Analysis of Barbara W Tuchman's The Guns of August
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The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
A predilection for the high drama of war stories and an appreciation for history as narrative led me explore Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August , a dramatic, comprehensive and painstakingly detailed account of the beginnings of World War One. Having read her history of fourteenth century Europe, A Distant Mirror, I was eager to see how she would apply her style of taking important individuals of the period and showing how events unfolded through the prism of their experiences, to the subject of the First World War. Moreover, the period is one in which I have long been interested, having been introduced to it through the World War One poets, T. S. Elliot’s The Wasteland and All Quiet on the Western Front. The very individual tragedy of this war and the one it engendered a generation later was brought home to me when I lived in France and saw the village memorials and the plaques in Paris commemorating the spots where a civilian had been dragged out and “fusillé par les Allemands,” (shot by the Germans.) Finally, the fact that nearly a century later we are still grappling with war and the world that arose out of 1914 gave immediacy and poignancy to the reading of this book exactly ninety years since the events it records took place. The Guns of August is a military history of the first month of the First World War written by a self-taught scholar and physician’s wife who combined raising three daughters and writing her first books. The Guns of August, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1962, cemented her reputation in the field of history. Tuchman was a traditional historian who depended on facts scoured painstakingly from a plethora of primary and secondary sources and who wove a gripping narrative from the interplay of these facts, an exploration of the role of individuals, and a consideration of the complex motivations which may have led them to take the actions they did. Rather than imposing her own loose
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
A predilection for the high drama of war stories and an appreciation for history as narrative led me explore Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August , a dramatic, comprehensive and painstakingly detailed account of the beginnings of World War One. Having read her history of fourteenth century Europe, A Distant Mirror, I was eager to see how she would apply her style of taking important individuals of the period and showing how events unfolded through the prism of their experiences, to the subject of the First World War. Moreover, the period is one in which I have long been interested, having been introduced to it through the World War One poets, T. S. Elliot’s The Wasteland and All Quiet on the Western Front. The very individual tragedy of this war and the one it engendered a generation later was brought home to me when I lived in France and saw the village memorials and the plaques in Paris commemorating the spots where a civilian had been dragged out and “fusillé par les Allemands,” (shot by the Germans.) Finally, the fact that nearly a century later we are still grappling with war and the world that arose out of 1914 gave immediacy and poignancy to the reading of this book exactly ninety years since the events it records took place. The Guns of August is a military history of the first month of the First World War written by a self-taught scholar and physician’s wife who combined raising three daughters and writing her first books. The Guns of August, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1962, cemented her reputation in the field of history. Tuchman was a traditional historian who depended on facts scoured painstakingly from a plethora of primary and secondary sources and who wove a gripping narrative from the interplay of these facts, an exploration of the role of individuals, and a consideration of the complex motivations which may have led them to take the actions they did. Rather than imposing her own loose