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William Collen's avatar

Fully agree; one of the most engaging and captivating history books for me was Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," about the first month of World War I. Tuchman says, in the book's preface, that not a single thing she mentions is a fabrication—if she says, "the weather was gloomy that day," she has meteorological reports to back up her assertion. That's a welcome perspective; history can be an entertaining narrative full of depth and detail, without having to be the product of the historian's imagination.

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Kath Mora's avatar

This resonated a lot with me and got me thinking: "What use is history if we don’t remember it, if it doesn’t inflame the spirit as well as the mind?"

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