Cognitive Bias in History

I just started reading Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” and, while I’m only in the introduction, I’m already enjoying it. I read “The Guns of August” after hearing that JFK read and re-read it and thought it was indispensable. I too went back a couple of months later and read the whole thing again, not because JFK used to but because it was so damn interesting and readable. I love learning about history - particularly history that helps you see our current world better. Walking through English villages and being able to explain why there are lots of houses from a given time period, or why schools might or might not exist, or where a pub’s name comes from…I just like the feeling of everything being built upon something, and spying the ‘something’ from between the cracks. The Proud Tower promises that it’ll cover world history (or, Anglophone and Western European history) in the years before the first world war. This is a period that I’ve not read a huge deal about, and certainly not…