Because this is a narrative history (as are pretty much all of Tuchman’s) part of the job of the review, as I see it, is to separate the history itself from the telling of that history. Here, Tuchman gives a much more detailed accounting of the Zimmerman Telegram (Note), which for most American, exists as either a figurative footnote or a literal blurb in their high school American history classes. So the story here mostly revolves around a few key themes: cryptography — what is […]