Wakeman And Qing Study

Professor Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., who taught at Berkeley since 1965. As a leading scholar in the field, he was President of the American Historical Association in 1992. Nationally he had, since 1974, chaired or served on the advisory committees on Chinese Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Sciences Research Council. He was a key figure, in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the establishment of the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China, a national committee housed at the National Academy of Sciences that oversaw and facilitated scholarly exchanges in all fields between the United States and China. He was a Senior Advisor to the Beijing office of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the CSCPRC from 1985 to 1986. This was followed by membership on the U.S.-USSR Binational Commission on the Social Science and Humanities from 1986 to 1989, and membership with the Council on Foreign Relations in 1986. He was President of the Social Science Research Council in New York from 1986 to 1989. Upon returning to Berkeley, he served as the Director of the Institute for East Asian Studies from 1990 to 2001. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1998.Being a productive scholar, he had published, edited and co-edited over thirty books in English and Chinese and authored over one hundred essays and articles that appeared in learned journals as well as popular journals such as The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. Some of them like Wakeman's first monograph, "Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861" (1966), which was a pioneering work of local history that explored the social unrest affecting the Canton region in the wake of the Opium War; or his most famous work, "The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century" (1985), this two-volume narrative history of court debates and literati culture was honored in 1987 with the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies; these literary works have had strong impact on historical writing, and been a important part of the academic communities.This dissertation will follow the general principles and approaches of History and Historiography to explore Wakeman's main works of Ching Dynasty. The fundamental purpose of this case studies is to trace his basic thoughts, methodology as historical narrative, and academic contributions, etc.