Name: The proud tower
ISBN: 9780345405012

The proud tower

The fateful quarter-century leading up to the Great War comes magnificently to life in these pages. It 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 in man's record, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny. In portraying this world Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. Her aim, as she writes in her foreword, is "to discover the quality of the world from which the Great War came." - Jacket flap.

What Hacker News says

kjs3Nov 2022

Many thanks for the recommendation; picked up a copy. Tuchman wrote Guns of August and The Proud Tower about the times immediately before, during and after the start of WWI. I found both outstanding reads and I can only think A Distant Mirror to be worth the time.

thread

wrycoderAug 2022

For info on how the anarchists aligned with the left at the end of the 19th century, I recommend Barbara Tuchman's book, The Proud Tower[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Proud_Tower

thread

breckenedgeApr 2022

Highly recommend Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower if anyone wants to learn more about these years before WWI. The simultaneous rise of nationalism and global communism is fascinating. So much hope is placed in peace conferences, right up until the end.

thread

tomjen3Mar 2021

Barbara Tuckman is more famous for writing the Guns of August, but she also wrote the the Proud Tower[0] about the (European) world in the 25 years leading up to WWI, and in the concluding chapter she talks about how before the war the people thought they were good, they were proud of the society they had built, but that didn't survive the war, and it /never/ came back at least of Europe. And I mean the book was written in 1996, so any memories of the war are both eclipsed by WWII and burried with a few old people.

I don't think the social capital shifted so much in the US, certainly there are more people being administrators than there was before, but notice how much people like Elon Musk, or the flowers left outside Apple Stores when Steve Jobs died.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Proud-Tower-Portrait-Before-1890-1914...

thread

breckenedgeDec 2021

I’ve read her WWI trilogy The Zimmerman Telegram, The Proud Tower, and The Guns of August. The Zimmerman Telegram and The Guns of August were both amazing, and The Zimmerman Telegram is short, to me it read better than any Tom Clancy novel. The Proud Tower is good but didn’t seem great. Nicolas and Alexandra by Robert Massie also occurs during that period and is worth picking up.

thread

breckenedgeSep 2021

My only hope is that the blowback from this, and the other recently passed-yet-unpopular Texas laws (constitutional carry and elections conduct prohibitions), catalyzes the opposition in the upcoming 2022 election cycle.

My only salve has been reading Barbara Tuchman's account of the parliamentary overreach and reaction in turn-of-the-20th century UK in The Proud Tower.

thread