In the 14th century, as today, men lived with the possibility that the entire human race might be exterminated-then by the Black Death, which reduced the population of Europe by 50 per cent in five decades now by atomic radiation.

Now, in A Distant Mirror, she has deserted the contemporary scene to portray “the calamitous 14th century.” With more than 100,000 copies already in print, in addition to those distributed by three major book clubs, her new book may well reach a larger audience than any other serious work of history published in our time.Ī Distant Mirror is a spacious portrait of an age that was at once wholly different from our own and yet, in odd and unexpected ways, curiously similar to our times. Tuchman published Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which won her second Pulitzer Prize. Though lacking so clear a focus, The Proud Tower (1966) was an immensely readable “portrait of the world before the War, 1890-1914.” In 1971 Mrs. Tuchman in 1962, with the appearance of The Guns of August, a panoramic survey of the outbreak of of World War I. Tuchman’s books, The Zimmerman Telegram (1958), was as carefully plotted and as suspenseful as any detective story. Since the publication of her first book, Bible and Sword (1956), she has shown a steadily ripening talent. Though equipped with indisputable professional credentials, he disdained the petty squabbles of academic historians and retained to the end the amateur’s excited devotion to his subject.)Īny future list of truly great American historians will include the name of another self-taught scholar, Barbara W. (The name of Samuel Eliot Mori-son really belongs in this list too. Prescott, and Francis Parkman in the 19th century, to Henry Adams and James Ford Rhodes at the beginning of this century, down to Allen Nevins and Bruce Catton in our own day. Instead it has been fostered by dedicated amateur historians from George Bancroft, William H. The great tradition in American history, we need to remind ourselves, is not one nurtured in our graduate seminars. These days, when the historians’ world seems so completely dominated by the products of the graduate schools, it is chastening to remember the outcome of that survey. All the others were self-taught historians who had made names for themselves despite-or perhaps because of-their lack of formal professional credentials.

The final list included only one scholar who had received regular graduate training and held a Ph.D. In 1948 the American Historical Association conducted a poll to identify the six greatest American historians who were no longer living. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

A distant mirror by barbara w tuchman