The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman
The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman
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The Proud Tower
A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Unabridged: 22 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/26/2005


Synopsis

The fateful quarter century leading up to World War I was a time when the world of privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of protest was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.”The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change to that point in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.Barbara Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy; the anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; two peace conferences in the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized by the death of heroic Jean Jaurès on the night the war began and an epoch ended.

Author Bio

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) was a self-trained historian and author who achieved prominence with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo from 1934 to 1935. She then began working as a journalist and contributed to publications including the Nation, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Before her death in 1989, she authored several other books, including The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, The First Salute, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45, also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Tuchman to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

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