shanks,

I'm sure you guessed that I didn't really pick Barbara Tuchman at random; she used to say (she died about 10 years ago) that she thought of herself not as a historian but as a person who wrote about history. She is more well known for "The Guns of August" and "Stillwell and the American Experience in China", for both of which she won the Pulitzer prize (for what that's worth). She first developed her passion for 'historical events' reporting on the Spanish Civil War; her bias there was loyalist. Here's a little blurb:
http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/tuchman.html

As for "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century"; I think you read a bit *too much into the title. 'Mirror' certainly reflects [sorry] her approach: what can we discern from the past that is parallel to our own time, perhaps redounding to our benefit? 'Distant' as in before the time of Gutenburg, and therefore somewhat murky. 'Calamitous' as in heresies, pogroms, Black Plague, internecine wars, the Crusades, etc. (As for 'The', I'd guess that an ariticle was wanted and "A Calamitous 14th Century" doesn't quite work -- where it would in "A Calamitous Century".)

So what do I make of all of this? I think we all bring some personal bias to whatever we write. But that doesn't necessarily make what we write biased. Read: I think that there *is such a thing as objectivity.