The Guns of August is Tuchman’s third book, after Bible and Sword, published in 1956, and the Zimmermann Telegram, in 1958, [Notes 4] and by her own account “the genesis of this book lies in [these] two earlier books I wrote, of which the First World War was the focal point of both. […] I had always thought that 1914 was the hour when the clock struck, so to speak, the date that ended the nineteenth century and began our own age, “the Terrible Twentieth” as Churchill called it. I felt that 1914 was it. But I did not know what should be the gateway or the framework."[20] She was approached by Cecil Scott of MacMillan who asked her to write a book on 1914, particularly on the battle of Mons and on “how had the BEF thrown back the Germans [and whether] they [had] really seen the vision of an angel over the battlefield."[21] But Tuchman was more interested in writing a book on the escape of the German cruiser Goeben from Royal Navy’s Gloucester, an event that would precipitate the Ottoman Empire into the war and for which she had personal affinity since she was present, although aged only two, with her parents on a small steamer from which they witnessed this naval pursuit. But Mr Scott was not interested in that episode. In the end, “I formed the plan of keeping to the war’s first month, which contained all the roots, including the Goeben and Battle of Mons, to make us both happy."[21]
Tuchman had a personal connection to the Goeben episode since she was present, as a child aged two, on a small boat nearby the pursuit: "That morning [August 10, 1914] there arrived in Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester's action against Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau."[22] Being the grandchild of Henry Morgenthau, she is referring to herself as she confirmed in 1981 in her book Practicing History,[23] in which she tells the story of her father, Maurice Wertheim, who was traveling from Constantinople to Jerusalem on August 29, 1914, to deliver funds to the Jewish community there. This connection, and her initial desire to write a book on the episode, might explain why two academic reviewers found this chapter "long and somewhat awkward"[24] and "out of context".[25]
Tuchman creates by combining the standard method of academic history, which is to read authentic, original material with activities more readily associated with journalism, such as field trips. Thus, to write the Guns of August, she read “letters, telegrams, diaries, memoirs, cabinet documents, battle orders, secret codes, and billets-doux [found in] the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the British Library and Public Record Office, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Sterling Library at Yale and the Widener Library at Harvard, [and] rented a small Renault and toured the battlefield of Belgium and France .”[26]
