Education and Early Career
Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota on 24 May 1907. He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in order to study British imperial history. At Oxford, Fairbank learned that the Qing imperial archives were being opened, and sought the counsel of H.B. Morse, the eminent historian of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, who became his mentor. The ambitious young scholar decided to go to Beijing to do research for his doctoral degree in 1932. In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent historian Tsiang Tingfu who introduced him to the study of newly available diplomatic sources and the perspectives of Chinese scholarship. Wilma Cannon came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis, which he revised and published as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 in 1953.
He returned to Harvard in 1936 to take up a position teaching Chinese history, Harvard's first full time specialist on that subject. He and Edwin O. Reischauer worked out a year long introductory survey which covered China and Japan, and later Korea and Southeast Asia. The course was known as "Rice Paddies," and became the basis for the influential texts, East Asia: The Great Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
Read more about this topic: John K. Fairbank
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, early and/or career:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)