The Historical Process

In 1981, Barbara Werteim Tuchman explained her historical process in the preface to Practicing History: Selected Essays, her collection of inspiring, still-relevant essays highlighting her experiences writing about the past:

''a sense of history as accidental and perhaps cyclical, of human conduct as a steady stream running through endless fields of changing circumstances, of good and bad always coexisting and inextricably mixed in periods as in people, of cross-currents and counter-currents usually present to contradict too-easy generalizations.''