Although she only spent one and a half months in Spain, Tuchman observes those six weeks were perhaps the most inspiring of her early years. "[The war] was the great cause of young people in those days--everyone left of center," Tuchman recalls. "You felt that you were engaged in something--you were fighting fascism. When you have a movement like this, life takes on new meaning."

After leaving Spain, Tuchman stayed on in Paris, writing for United Editorial--a U.S.-sponsored publishing outfit that issued a weekly report on the war--and working against non--intervention and appeasement. As she later wrote, "It was a somber, exciting, believing, betraying time, with heroes, hopes, and illusions. I have always felt that the year and decade of reaching one's majority, rather than of one's birth, is the stamp one bears. I think of myself as a child of the '30s. I was a believed then, as I suppose people in their 20s must be (or, were, in my generation). I believed that the right and rational would win in the end."

After the Munich appeasement, Tuchman's worried father urged her to come home. Returning to New York, she worked with journalist Jay Allen, compiling a chronological record of the Spanish Civil War. The defeat of the Spanish Republic later that year, she wrote, was "the event that cracked my heart, politically speaking, and replaced my illusions with recognition of Real-politick; it was the beginning of adulthood."

On June 18, 1940--the day Hitler entered Paris--Tuchman got married. She spent the morning of her wedding day drafting a letter to the President, urging him to take action. One year later, the U.S. too was at war.

* * *

The war and her marriage brought Tuchman's journalistic career to a close, and it was nearly a decade before she again began thinking about writing. "I always thought that to write a book was the greatest thing in the world," Tuchman says, "but I never really had the confidence. Then, in 1948, when the state of Israel was created, it gave me a push."

The result was Bible and Sword, a history of the relations between Britain and Palestine from the Phoenicians to the close of World War I. Although the book took "six or seven years of very interrupted effort" and significantly longer to find a publisher, it eventually appeared in 1956. The experience taught Tuchman two things: that she could write history well, and that "I could not write contemporary history if I tried."

Originally, Tuchman was intended to carry the story through 1943--through the years of the British mandate, the Arab-Israel war, and the final re-establishment of Israel. She spent six months of research on the history of these bitter last 30 years but, as she later explained. "When I tried to write this as history, I could not do it. Anger, disgust, and a sense of injustice can make some write eloquent and evoke brilliant polemic, but the emotions stunted and twisted my pen." This lesson has remained with her throughout her work.

But if she scrupulously avoids writing about contemporary events. Tuchman admits that she often looks for mirrors of the present in the past and frequently chooses her subjects because of their current significance. The Guns of August, she says, arose because "I felt I had to do something on 1914, since that's when the 20th century really began." Finishing that, she turned to The Proud Tower because "I realized that the cause of World War I was not really in the diplomatic correspondence of 1913 and 1914, but the social forces of the decades before that "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, sprang from her frustrations over the Vietnam War. "I had worked on the Far Eastern desk of the Office of War Information, during the war, and knew that Americans really knew very little about Asia. The Stilwell and Vietnam experiences seemed to be very similar.

But it is perhaps in her most recent history, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, that Tuchman's parallel is most explicit. "The Bomb is very much a factor in everyone's mind," she says, "and I wanted to find out what was the effect on society of a massive destructive force." Tuchman had originally intended to focus the book on the Black Death," the most lethal disaster in recorded history" which ---between 1308 and 1350--killed an estimated one-third of the population living between India and Ireland. The book eventually expanded to cover the entire century, a period when "assumptions were cracking institutions were breaking up, and everything people believed in was being destroyed. "Pausing for a moment, Tuchman adds quietly. "That's very much what's happened in my own time. To me, that's the mirror.

* * *

In 1966, in an address to the Chicago Historical Society, Tuchman observed.

I visualize the "large organizing idea as one of those iron chain mats pulled behind by a tractor to smooth over a plowed field. I see the professor climbing up on the tractor seat and away he goes pulling behind his large organizing idea over the bumps and furrows and history until he has smoothed it out to a nice, neat, organized surface, in other words, into a system.

Since Tuchman, the humanist, spoke these words, her philosophy, of history has gradually evolved to a place more and more emphasis on the second dimension of her theory. Half a century ago she saw institutions destroyed in Japan and Stalinist Russia, and watched idealism self-distract in the country side of Civil War-torn Spain. In the last 15 years--she has seen the Vietnam War. Watergate and the atom bomb trigger the same reactions in the United States, she has with increasing frequency turned to history for answers. Although she still retains her humanistic vision, she has gradually focused more attention on dredging history for clues.

Folly and Government, Tuchman's forthcoming book which she described at the Atherton Lecture, appears to carry this evolution to its logical extreme. Where Tuchman once proclaimed that "I am a disciple of the once because I mistrust history in gallon jugs," her new book will span 4000 years of legend and fact. Where Tuchman once wrote that "insistence on purpose turns the historian into a prophet" her new book is defined by purpose, its conclusions implicitly prophetic. And the 12 case studies, Tuchman uses to explore her question were explicitly chosen because of their conformance to strict criteria. Stated or not, Folly and Government employs a "large organizing idea" to transform at least one small branch of history into a system.

In the book, Tuchman says she will explore the reasons that governments, "pursue a policy contrary to their own self-interests." "Mankind makes a poorer performance of government than any other human activity." Tuchman said in her lecture. "The ubiquity of the problem today is almost a disease."

Both chronologically and geographically, the cases she will consider are widespread: the Trojan decision to knock down their walls to admit the wooden horse. Montezuma's refusal to send his vast armies against Cortes. Napoleon's fated invasion of Russia, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the American involvement in Vietnam.

But while Tuchman's approach reveals a shift in her philosophy, her conclusions reflect her unwavering belief that "history is people--bizarre is not inexplicable." She finds the answers to her quest, not in institutions or social forces, but if the failings and foibles of the individual. Her final conclusion reflects both a cynical understanding of human nature, and an ultimate faith in the tenacity of mankind. "I don't think we're going to improve, but we're going to muddle through."