Barbara W. Tuchman. Practicing History. – book review
Edward James Mills, III
New York: Ballantine Books, 2000 edition. 306 pages. Paperback, $12.95.
What a delight to have been asked to review Practicing History. In the 1970s and 1980s I discovered Ms. Tuchman in her books A Distant Mirror, The Proud Tower, and The Guns of August. I was then, and am still, in awe of her ability to write history and make it readable. This volume of essays is no exception. It begins with a preface detailing her criteria for choosing the essays in this volume. In doing so, she reveals a great deal about “the furniture of her mind” later in life, looking back on a long, successful career. The essays are divided into three groups: “The Craft,” “The Yield,” and “Learning From History,” each group having from eight to thirteen essays. Essays in “The Craft” deal with how one researches and writes good history. Those in “The Yield” are some she believes are her best and lasting efforts. Those in “Learning From History” are harder to categorize. They appear to be a collection of her writings originally meant to convince the reader what she, as a historian, believed were sane understandings of heated and complex social and political issues. These range from generalship to the American presidency; from the war in Vietnam to the complex of ideals we call the “American Dream.”
In this diversity of subject matter there are recurring themes that will not surprise readers who are familiar with the larger body of her work. In “The Craft” she repeatedly stresses the need for history to be “readable” if it is to be of any use to society, academic or non-academic. She points out the need for balancing the dual essentials of good historiography: good research and artistry in writing. She stresses the importance of stopping to write accurately and well. Tuchman also addresses the thorny issue of bias in history writing, ultimately arguing that “To take no sides in history would be as false as to take no sides in life.” (60) She repeatedly returns to the merits of using biography as the major technique in telling history, which was her signature as a historian. In reading the section entitled “The Craft” I was struck that she was what I would call a “populist historian.” This may explain her enormous popular support and the animus towards her that I have encountered in some academic circles.
As to the content of the other two sections, familiar thematic elements also recur again and again. Noticeable are Stillwell and China policy; the folly of land war in Asia; Western Culture and World War I; folly in leadership and governance; the shift in American identity and foreign policy from being vehemently non-imperialistic to becoming unabashedly imperialistic and interventionist in the years between 1850 and 1950; Judaism, Israel and Assimilation; and the American theory of a governmental balance of power and her suggestion of a new “cabinet government” for the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. I found her essays about the long-term shifts in American foreign policy as cogent today as they were thirty years ago. I suspect that, if still alive, she might argue that there is only a degree of difference in our interventions in Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Iraq. She might well ask the question, “Exactly what were our vital security interests and exit strategies for each?” She does, however, believe that support for the nation of Israel was a foreign policy intervention which should have been entered into, and is in fact scathing in her criticism of Western refusals to save the Jews from the Nazis when they had opportunities to do so (turning away refugee ships, for example). She may well be correct in her assessment, but these views seem a bit contradictory when compared with her general hesitancy to see America in the role of the world’s policeman.
As a personal aside, I found Tuchman’s assessment of Richard Nixon’s presidency as hopelessly corrupt and he in need of impeachment and conviction compelling still, no matter how painful and difficult the process might be. I found myself wondering if she would have seen the same level of corruption and need for impeachment of President Clinton. I found her arguments that the American Executive branch had become too imperial and too vitally important for it to be vested in one person, as President, and her proposal of a “cabinet government” on the European style surprisingly persuasive. She asks questions that, time-bound as they are, should haunt us still.
Ms. Tuchman is clearly a person of her own era and embodies some biases inherited from a time long past. Younger and more radicalized readers may chafe at her (often unconscious) vies about gender roles, ethnicity, and most particularly her assumptions about Israel and Jewish/Arab relations in the Middle East. These readers must realize that she embodies what significant numbers of Americans believed about Israel and her destiny until very recently. For those who find her biases irritating, or even quaint, I believe there is enough real gold in this mine to justify digging through the dross of another’s biases.
Edward James Mills III
Department of History
East Tennessee State University
COPYRIGHT 2001 Pi Gamma Mu
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
