Practicing History by Barbara W. Tuchman

Her writing is strongest when she's writing actual history, not opining on Vietnam or Watergate (which, when she was writing about them, were current). It contains the not very historical sentence 'Where the Jew questions, the Arab dreams,' and points more starkly than any other essay here to Tuchman's own dictum that 'a historian needs.a perspective of at least twenty-five years, and preferably fifty, to form an opinion of any value.' From the perspective of the 21st century, these two might be the weakest pieces, although they do have some competition. And the essay 'Israel's Swift Sword,' written also in 1967, for The Atlantic, has such a worshipful tone it could have been ghostwritten by the IDF.

Rather than standing up to the test of time, her criterion for inclusion, it seems like something frozen in a cheery time capsule. But her 1967 piece 'Israel: Land of Unlimited Impossibilities,' reads today as almost ridiculously boosterish. Tuchman mentions several pieces that she had axed from the collection pre-publication because they read as too out-of-date, including an account of President Kennedy's funeral. Here we learn why President McKinley did not listen when deciding whether to annex the Philippines, why President Wilson did not listen when sending the Marines to Vera Cruz, and why President Roosevelt did not accept the truths of the Stalinist purges which were being reported to him by American Embassy staff in Moscow. The second section is titled 'The Yield' - meaning what her craft yielded - and the third section is titled 'Learning from History.' In this section, 'Why Policy-Makers Do Not Listen' was very good, because it contains little historical set-pieces rather than simply opinion. Resist including some irresistible anecdote if it doesn't help or advance your narrative. Among her pointers: use primary sources only and edit ruthlessly. By far the most interesting pieces are in the first section, 'The Craft,' where she discusses her habits of research and writing. I'm somewhat new to Tuchman, having read only The Guns of August and this 1981 compilation of essays and speeches ranging from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Practicing History by Barbara W. Tuchman