Author: awelky - Starting with I

I’ve been contemplating the nature of history recently, as we often do here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas. I’m sure that this is not a great surprise to readers of this blog. This contemplation stems, in part, from listening to an audiobook of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara W. Tuchman’s 1978 book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. She begins the book by listing the various sources we have for late medieval history, commenting on how they can easily skew our perception of the time period, especially given, as she notes, that no pope ever issued a papal bull for something of which he approved, but rather almost exclusively against something. Building upon this, she writes: Disaster is rarely …