The Guns of August

The Guns of August, published 50 years after the outbreak of World War I, provided a history lesson wrapped in narrative prose. It was a book meant for public consumption and sold well due to its readability, and the public assumed it was a comprehensive analysis. Tuchman used “the vast majority of memoir material [that] had been published, as well as major collections of documents” to “give the reader a sense of intimacy with events” (Williamson Jr., Samuel R. “Revaluation: Fifty Years On: The Guns of August, Always Popular, Always Flawed.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 121, no. 1, 2013). Readers during the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and just after the Bay of Pigs disaster, readily became engaged in Tuchman’s interpretation of the events leading to the first world war, as it looked like the US was very close to entering a third. The book also drew praise from reviewers at popular publications such as Publisher’s Weekly.

However, Tuchman’s analysis was not without its critics; for example, history professor Harold J Gordon argued that Tuchman’s account entirely overlooked historical scholarship on the war (Gordon, Harold J.