Summary Of The Plague Barbara Tuchman

Topic/Thesis: The main idea of this essay is to recall the events and horrors of the Black Death. This is the plague that ravaged the world from 1347 to 1352 (History.com Staff). Tuchman describes the journey of the pestilence and how it affects each country and their individual cities. Tuchman also specifically gives the death tolls of major cities and different groups that were affected. She demonstrates how the plague that struck Europe and other parts of the world resulted in filth, fear and chaos. This essay discusses and reports various personal accounts to the disaster of the Black Death. Tuchman clearly defines what forms the plague came in and how it affected different areas. She also describes the emotional and social consequences. She lays out the facts about the plague and the effects it had on the world as well as individual families and people. Tuchman also points out victims that belonged to the upper class during that time such as Queen Jeanne and historian Giovanni Villanni (296-297). In this she shows how the plague killed people of all kinds to distress the brutality of the plague.

She won the Pulitzer Prize twice during her lifetime (Barbara Tuchman). Se described her writing motives as "the object is--or should be--to hold the reader's attention” (Nordquist). She “vividly illustrates the terrifying symptoms of the plague that came to be known as the Black Death” (Nordquist). Her role as a historian and writer in this instance is to allow the reader to understand the Black Plague and personally feel what it was like to live during that tragedy. Tuchman reinforces her credibility when doing so as she cites specific statistics and anecdotes of that