Barbara W . Tuchman Barbara Wertheim Tuchman ( ; January 30 , 1912 – February 6 , 1989 ) was an American historian and author . She won the Pulitzer Prize twice , for " The Guns of August " ( later " August 1914 " ) , a best - selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I , and " Stilwell and the American Experience in China : 1911 - 1945 " , a biography of General Joseph Stilwell . Tuchman focused on writing popular history . Life and career . Tuchman was the daughter of the banker Maurice Wertheim . She was a first cousin of New York district attorney Robert M . Morgenthau , a niece of Henry Morgenthau , Jr . and granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau Sr . , Woodrow Wilson ' s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire . In a 1963 lecture , Tuchman recalled , History began to exert its fascination upon me when I was about six , through the medium of the Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins . I became absorbed in the fortunes of the " Dutch Twins " ; the " Twins of the American Revolution " , who daringly painted the name ' Modeerf ' , or ' Freedom ' spelled backwards , on their rowboat ; and especially the " Belgian Twins " , who suffered under the German occupation in 1914 . After the Twins , I went through a G . A . Henty period and bled with Wolfe in Canada . Then came a prolonged Dumas period , during which I became so acquainted with the Valois Kings , Queens , Royal Mistresses , and various Ducs de Guise that when we visited the French Chateaux I was able to point out to my family just who had stabbed whom in which room . Conan Doyle ' s " The White Company " , and , above all , Jane Porter ' s " The Scottish Chiefs " , were the definitive influence . As the noble Wallace , in tartan and velvet tam , I went to my first masquerade party , stalking in silent tragedy among the twelve year old Florence Nightingale s and Juliet s . In the book the treachery of the Countess of Mar , who betrayed Wallace , carried a footnote that left its mark on me . ' The crimes of this wicked woman , ' it said darkly , ' are verified by history . ' She received her Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College in Cambridge , Massachusetts in 1933 . From 1934 to 1935 , she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo , and then began a career as a journalist before turning to writing books . When John Loomis Sherman left as head of a Communist spy ring in Tokyo ( second to that of Richard Sorge ) , Tuchman took over Sherman ' s cover ( less espionage activities ) as head of Tokyo offices for the American Feature Writers Syndicate ( established in New York City by Sherman , literary agent Maxim Lieber , and fellow Soviet Underground spy Whittaker Chambers ) . As a journalist , she was the editorial assistant for " The Nation " and an American correspondent for the " New Statesman " in London , the Far East News Desk , and the Office of War Information ( 1944 – 45 ) . Tuchman was a trustee of Radcliffe College and a lecturer at Harvard University , the University of California , and the Naval War College . A tower of Currier House , a residential division of Harvard College was named in her honor . Personal . In 1939 , she married Lester R . Tuchman , an internist , medical researcher and professor of clinical medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan . They had three daughters , including Jessica Mathews . Tuchman ' s Law . Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts . The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place . Besides , persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance , as we know from our own times . After absorbing the news of today , one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes , crimes , power failures , broken water mains , stalled trains , school shutdowns , muggers , drug addicts , neo - Nazis , and rapists . The fact is that one can come home in the evening - - on a lucky day - - without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena . This has led me to formulate Tuchman ' s Law , as follows : " The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five - to tenfold " ( or any figure the reader would care to supply ) . Tuchman ' s Law has been defined as a psychological principle of ' perceptual readiness ' or ' subjective probability ' . Awards and honors . Tuchman twice won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non - Fiction , first for " The Guns of August " in 1963 , and again for " Stilwell and the American Experience in China , 1911 – 45 " in 1972 . She won a U . S . National Book Award in History for the first paperback edition of " A Distant Mirror " in 1980 . Also in 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities ( NEH ) selected Tuchman for the Jefferson Lecture , the U . S . federal government ' s highest honor for achievement in the humanities . Tuchman ' s lecture was entitled " Mankind ' s Better Moments . " Criticism . In 1985 , " Saturday Review " magazine named her one of the country ' s " Most Overrated People in American Arts and Letters , " commenting that " over the years [ she has made ] an unhappy transition from writing history as a moral lesson to writing moral lessons as history . ”