The Proud Tower

First edition
(publ.The Macmillan Company)

The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914is a 1966 book byBarbara Tuchman,consisting of a collection of essays she had published in various periodicals during the mid-1960s. It followed the publication of the highly successful bookThe Guns of August(published in Britain asAugust 1914). Each chapter deals with a different country, theme, and time (although all relate to the approximately 25 years precedingWorld War I). Two chapters are about Britishgovernmentsin 1895 and 1910; one chapter is dedicated to theDreyfus Affairin France; and another is nominally about theWilhelminepolitics of late 19th-century Germany, but is really about Germanmusicandculturein that period. Other chapters cover the United States (particularly the efforts ofThomas Reed,Speaker of the House, to overcome the tyranny of the absent quorum), theHague Conventions of 1899 and 1907,theanarchistmovement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the activities of theSocialist Internationaland trade unions.

The title of the book is derived from the 1845Edgar Allan Poepoem "The City in the Sea".Two lines of the poem are used as the epigraph for the book:" While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down. "