Ray Huang
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Ray Huang | |||||||||||
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Born | |||||||||||
Died | January 8, 2000 | (aged 81)||||||||||
Alma mater | Nankai University University of Michigan | ||||||||||
Spouse | Gayle Bates | ||||||||||
Scientific career | |||||||||||
Fields | Macro history | ||||||||||
Institutions | Columbia University State University of New York at New Paltz Center for East Asian Research Cambridge University | ||||||||||
Doctoral advisor | Yu Ying-shih | ||||||||||
Chinese name | |||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | |||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | |||||||||||
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Ray Huang (Chinese:
Early life[edit]
Ray Huang was born in Ningxiang, Hunan Province, in 1918.[1] He was the oldest of three children. His father, Huang Zhenbai (
Soon afterwards, Huang entered the Republic of China Military Academy (
Academic career[edit]
Huang went to the United States to study Chinese history. At the University of Michigan, he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1957, and his doctorate in 1964. He was appointed visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1967, and a professor at the State University of New York, New Paltz Branch, from 1968 to 1980. He was a research fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard in 1970.
He worked with the leading American Sinologist John K. Fairbank. Nevertheless, Huang and Fairbank disagreed in research methodology. Fairbank liked concentrated analysis in short time frames and limited areas, but Huang liked synthesis covering broad time periods (though Huang's classic work 1587, a Year of No Significance had a very tight focus).
In 1972, Huang went to Cambridge University and assisted Joseph Needham, who was more sympathetic to Huang's research approach, in Needham's monumental work on the history of Chinese science and technology. Huang's chosen field of study became financial administration in Ming China, and he published one of his major works, Taxation and Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China, in 1974 (translated into Chinese only in 2001).
Huang returned to Cambridge in the mid-1970s and contributed two chapters to the Ming Dynasty Volumes of The Cambridge History of China. Around the late 1970s, he retired from teaching and focused on writing instead and even occasionally contributed to a column in Yazhou Zhoukan. Nonetheless, he often travelled to Taiwan even after his retirement to give lectures and participate in various academic exchanges.
His other works include The War in Northern Burma (1946), 1587, a Year of No Significance (1981) (also published in Chinese as The Fifteenth Year of Wan Li/《
Personal life[edit]
Huang married Gayle Bates (1937–2000) in 1966. The two had a son, Jefferson, a longtime administrator at Claremont McKenna College,[2] as well as two other sons from his wife's previous marriage.[3] Huang died of a heart attack in 2000.
Books[edit]
- 1587, a Year of No Significance. First published in English (Yale University Press, 1981), with Chinese (Wanli Shiwunian) and other language translations.
- China: A Macro History
- Fiscal Administration during the Ming Dynasty
- Conversation on Chinese History by the Hudson River (in Chinese)
- Broadening the Horizons of Chinese History: Discourses, Syntheses, and Comparisons
- Capitalism and the 21st Century(in Chinese)
- The Grand Canal during the Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644 (Doctoral dissertation)
- White Jasmine of Changsha (Novel)
- Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China
References[edit]
- ^ a b 宁乡
四 中 的 三 个名人 (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 2004-06-01. Retrieved 2003-11-21. - ^ "Meet Our Admission Officers | Claremont McKenna College".
- ^ "Gayle Huang Obituary (2000) - Beech Bluff, TN - The Jackson Sun". Legacy.com.
- 1918 births
- 2000 deaths
- 20th-century American historians
- 20th-century American male writers
- 20th-century Chinese historians
- 20th-century American philosophers
- 20th-century Chinese philosophers
- American academics of Chinese descent
- Chinese emigrants to the United States
- Chinese people of World War II
- Columbia University faculty
- Educators from Hunan
- Harvard Fellows
- Historians from Hunan
- Historians of China
- Nankai University alumni
- People from Ningxiang
- Philosophers from Hunan
- University of Michigan alumni
- Whampoa Military Academy alumni
- Writers from Changsha
- American male non-fiction writers