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MANKIND'S BETTER
MOMENTS
In her prize-winning A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Four- teenth Century (1978), historian Barbara Tuchman focused on a "violent, bewildered, suffering, and disintegrating age." She went on to see a few parallels with our own troubled times. But we should not be blinded by our present predicaments; every age has its ups and downs, as she explains in this essay adapted from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture, which she delivered...