Pamela K Crossley (born 18 November 1955) is a
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...
of modern
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
, northern Asia, and
global history and is the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History,
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...
. She is a founding appointment of the Dartmouth Society of Fellows.
She is author of ''The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800: An Interpretive History'' (2010), as well as influential studies of the
Qing dynasty
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...
(1644–1911) and leading textbooks in global history. Crossley is known for an interpretation of the source of twentieth-century
identities. In her view overland conquest by the great empires of
early modern Eurasia
Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelago a ...
produced a special form of rulership which gave high priority to the institutionalization of
cultural identity
Cultural identity is a part of a person's identity, or their self-conception and self-perception, and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct cultur ...
. Crossley suggests that these concepts were encoded in political practice and
academic discourse on "
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...
," and prevailed till the end of the twentieth century.
Biography
Crossley was born in
Lima, Ohio
Lima ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Allen County, Ohio, United States. The municipality is located in northwest Ohio along Interstate 75 in Ohio, Interstate 75 approximately north of Dayton, Ohio, Dayton, southwest of Toledo, Ohio, T ...
, and attended high school in
Emmaus, Pennsylvania
Emmaus ( ) is a borough (Pennsylvania), borough in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, it had a population of 11,652. Emmaus is located in the Lehigh Valley, the third lar ...
. After leaving high school she worked as an editorial assistant and writer on environmental subjects for
Rodale Press. In 1977 she graduated from
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...
, where she was editor-in-chief o
''The Phoenix'' her fellow students included
David C. Page
David C. Page (born 1956) is an American biologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the director of the Whitehead Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. He is best known for his work ...
,
Robert Zoellick
Robert Bruce Zoellick (; ; born July 25, 1953) is an American public official and lawyer who was the eleventh president of the World Bank, a position he held from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2012. He was previously a managing director of Goldman Sach ...
,
Ben Brantley
Benjamin D. Brantley (born October 26, 1954) is an American theater critic, journalist, editor, publisher and writer. He served as the chief theater critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1996 to 2017, and as co-chief theater critic from 2017 to ...
Wing Thye Woo Robert P. George,
and
David G. Bradley
David G. Bradley (born 1953) is partner in The Atlantic and Atlantic Media and the owner of the National Journal Group. Before his career as a publisher, Bradley founded the Advisory Board Company and Corporate Executive Board, two Washington-ba ...
. At Swarthmore she was a student o
Lillian M. Liand
Bruce Cumings
Bruce Cumings (born September 5, 1943) is an American historian of East Asia, professor, lecturer and author. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History, and the former chair of the history department at ...
, and as an undergraduate began graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania wit
Hilary Conroy She later entered
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
, where she was a student of
Yu Ying-shih
Yu Ying-shih (; 22 January 1930 – 1 August 2021) was a Chinese-born American historian, sinologist, and the Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was known for his mastery of sources for Chinese hi ...
an
Parker Po-fei Huang and wrote a dissertation under the direction of
Jonathan D. Spence. She joined the
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...
faculty in
Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover is a town located along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. As of the 2020 census, its population was 11,870. The town is home to the Ivy League university Dartmouth College, the U.S. Army Corps of Eng ...
, in 1985. After David Farquhar
Gertraude Roth Li an
Beatrice S. Bartlett Crossley was among the first scholars writing in English to use
Manchu-language documents to research the history of the
Qing Empire
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...
. More specialists subsequently adopted this practice. Crossley is a Guggenheim fellow, an NEH fellow (2011–2012) and a recipient of the Association for Asian Studies
Joseph Levenson Book Prize Joseph Levenson Book Prize is awarded each year in memory of Joseph R. Levenson by the Association for Asian Studies to two English-language books, one whose main focus is on China before 1900 and the other for works on post-1900 China. According to ...
for ''A Translucent Mirror''. Dartmouth students have given her the Goldstein Prize for teaching. Crossley resides in
Norwich, Vermont
Norwich is a town in Windsor County, in the U.S. state of Vermont. The population was 3,612 at the 2020 census. Home to some of the state of Vermont's wealthiest residents, the municipality is a commuter town for nearby Hanover, New Hampshir ...
.
Publications
Most recently Crossley has published ''The Wobbling Pivot: China Since 1800, An Interpretive History'' which takes the resilience and coherence of local communities in China as a theme for interpreting the transition from the late imperial to the modern era. Crossley's previous books are ''What is Global History?'' (Polity Press, 2008), an examination of narrative strategies in global history that joins a new series of short introductory books inspired by
E.H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a British historian, diplomat, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography. Carr was best known for '' A History of Soviet Russ ...
's ''What is History?''. Crossley's books on Chinese history include ''Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the
Qing
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...
World'' (Princeton University Press, 1990); ''The
Manchus
The Manchus (; ) are a Tungusic East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized ethnic minority in China and the people from whom Manchuria derives its name. The Later Jin (1616–1636) and Q ...
'' (Blackwells Publishers, 1997); ''A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology'' (University of California Press, 1999). She is also a co-author of the best-selling global history textbooks, ''The Earth and its Peoples'' (Houghton Mifflin, 5th edition, 2009; 6th edition, 2014) and ''Global Society: The World since 1900'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 2007; 3rd edition, 2012). Her work has appeared in two separate series of the Cambridge histories. She is widely published both in academic journals and in periodicals such as ''London Review of Books'', ''Wall Street Journal'', ''The New York Times Literary Supplement'', ''The New Republic'', ''Royal Academy Magazine'', ''Far Eastern Economic Review,'' ''Calliope'', and in the online editorial spaces of the BBC. She has participated in
A&E's "In Search of..." series ("The Forbidden City"). In January 2012 the new educational platform The Faculty Project announced that Crossley would produce a video course on Modern China for their site. Unusually, Crossley maintains an errata page for her publications, including exchanges with translators.
"Qing Studies," "New Qing History" and criticism by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Crossley is noted for her work in what has been called either
New Qing History The New Qing History () is a historiographical school that gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1990s by offering a wide-ranging revision of history of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China. Orthodox historians tend to emphasize the pow ...
or Qing Studies, which has come under attack by Chinese scholars associated with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Crossley pointed out that
Manchu
The Manchus (; ) are a Tungusic East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized ethnic minority in China and the people from whom Manchuria derives its name. The Later Jin (1616–1636) and ...
language, religion, documents, and customs remained of great importance to the Qing until the middle nineteenth century. Her book Orphan Warriors was the first to develop a sustained critique of conventional assumptions of "sinicization." She agreed that assimilation and acculturation were part of China's history, but considered "sinicization" to be something that historians had imbued with a charismatic quality with no basis in fact. She disagreed with earlier scholars that Manchus had been "sinicized", but she did not argue that Manchu culture in modern China was the traditional culture of Manchuria. Rather, it was a new culture of individual Manchu communities in China, what she called "the sense of difference that has no outward sign".
Many historians such a
Joanna Waley-Cohenhave named Crossley as related to the "New Qing History" school.
William T. Rowe
William T. Rowe (b. Brooklyn, New York, 24 July 1947) is a historian of China, and John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University. He considers himself a social historian of modern China, with bot ...
of
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...
describes Crossley as the "pioneer" of these new ways of thinking about Qing history. Earlier, political commentator Charles Horner pointed to Crossley as one of the most important current historians in the reconceptualization of the Qing period and its significance, which he did not refer to as "New Qing History.".
In publications in Korea and China since 2008 Crossley has written that there are two trends that are often conflated, one a "Manchu-centered" school and another group who view the Qing empire as a "historical object" in its own right (not only a phase in Chinese history). She criticized the "Manchu-centered" school for romanticism and relying on disproved theories about "Altaic" language, culture and history. She also argued that the analyses used by the group called "New Qing Historians" by Waley-Cohen and later popular with Chinese historians were various and conflicting, and that "New Qing History" as a "school" could not reasonably be extended beyond the small group who actually called themselves writers of "New Qing History." On the other hand, she seems to have included herself in the Qing empire school, which she calls "Qing Studies."
[Crossley, Pamela Kyle, The Influence of Altaicism on East Asian Studies," Proceedings of the 20098 Berkelley-KU Forum on East Asian Cultural Studies: Toward A New Paradigm in East Asian Cultural Studies, June 24–29, Seoul, South Korea,] She sees the Qing empire not as a Manchu empire but as a "simultaneous" system (like many other historical empires) in which the emperor is not subordinate to any single culture.
Of Crossley's books, only ''What is Global History?'' has been successfully translated and published in China. On April 20, 2015, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences published a criticism by historian Li Zhiting of historians he called a "New Qing History" faction, accusing former Association for Asian Studies President
Evelyn Rawski
Evelyn Sakakida Rawski (born February 2, 1939) is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History of the University of Pittsburgh and a scholar in Chinese and Inner Asian history. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of ...
, Crossley,
Mark C. Elliott and
James A. Millward personally as being apologists for imperialism, producing fraudulent history and encouraging "splittism" in border areas. This followed Internet criticism by Chinese posters of Crossley's 2011 editorial in the ''Wall Street Journal'', in which she contrasted the international foundations of the 1911 revolution in China with the narrow nationalism of the hundred-year celebration in 2011. Possibly Li Zhiting used some criticisms that Crossley herself had written in a 2008 essay which was translated into both Korean and Chinese in 2009 and 2010. The criticisms by Li were followed by an interview with associate professor Zhong Han (Minzu University) in the same CASS online journal, severely attacking both Crossley's methodologies and her interpretations. In a subsequent essay Zhong continued his attack on Crossley, citing errors in an article of hers that had been translated into Chinese. Crossley maintains a voluminous errata site linked to her faculty page since 1995; in a tweet, she pointed out that Zhong had missed the "good stuff" and recommended that he visit the page. Subsequently, Liu Wenpeng denounced the concept of "Inner Asia" as used by "New Qing" historians, apparently following Crossley's 2009 discussion of the history of the Inner Asian term.
Criticism of Crossley, Rawski and "New Qing" historians, particularly Elliott and Millward, continues in the Chinese press, possibly reinforcing campaigns against "Western culture" encouraged by the current Chinese government. Crossley was quoted in Kyodo New Service as saying, "We are not the targets," and that Chinese historians using non-Chinese documents and dealing with the history of Qing empire conquests were the real targets.
[http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2015/05/352199.html?searchType=site&req_type=article&phrase=crossley "U.S. Scholars in Crosshairs over Interpretation of China History"]
Global history
Crossley was a co-author of ''The Earth and its Peoples,'' which was a revolutionary text in 1997. She was invited to write ''What is Global History?'' in a Polity Press series of short texts introducing historical genres to undergraduates. It is a study of "narrative strategies" used by historians from many cultures, over history, to attempt to tell "a story without a center," which Crossley regards as the defining quality of "global history." In her own research work in the field of world or global history Crossley is known primarily for arguing, in agreement with a certain number of other historians of China, that not only material but also cultural and political trends produced an "early modern" period across Eurasia from about 1500 to about 1800. She has commented that while a Eurasian chronology that could be used for teaching is possible (as in the example of early modernity), it is not "global" since it would bring together Chinese and European history but isolate the histories of Africa, Australia, and North and South America.
Software development
Crossley is a software author, and has created applications for use by teachers, professors, community organizers to manage web pages. The free applications are specially designed for display of all "horizontally-written" scripts, and integrate functions needed for instant web page management. A widely used app aids students in study and memorization of the Chinese classic ''Daxue'' 大學. Other software makes this famous reference work
Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period used by students who do not know the Wade–Giles system accessible, and also integrates to Harvard University GIS database. It i
available to the public (link)both as a web interface and as a desktop internet application.
References
Citations
Sources
*
External links
"China at the Center of Eurasian History" (University of Birmingham, UK, February 25, 2015Crossley review of Jung Chang, ''Empress Dowager Cixi'' in ''London Review of Books'R. Kent Guy review of ''The Wobbling Pivot'' in ''The China Quarterly''The Faculty ProjectCrossley, "China's Century Long Identity Crisis, in the ''Wall Street Journal'', 10.10.2011Maura Dykstra, "Reflections on Qing History"*
ttp://www.asian-studies.org/EAA/Crossley-13-2.pdf Crossley, "The Late Qing Empire in Global History" in Association for Asian Studies,''Education about Asia'', Fall 2008br>
2001 Joseph Levenson Book PrizeYougoubian, David N., review of G.R. Garthwaite, ''The Persians'' in ''International Journal of Middle East Studies'', Volume 38, No.3, pp.489-491.*
ttp://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/iqbali.html Iftekhar Iqbali review of ''What is Global History?'' with Crossley response, ''IHR Reviews in History''br>
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto review of ''What is Global History?''Liu Wenming, "Memoir of translating ''What is Global History?'' (in Chinese)'Peter Wood review of ''The Wobbling Pivot'' in ''Asian Review of Books''Paul A. Cohen review of ''The Wobbling Pivot'' in ''China Journal''"Seven Faculty Members Names as Society of Fellows Mentors"Tonseth House Software DevelopmentSoftware interface for ''Eminent Chinese''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crossley, Pamela Kyle
1955 births
Living people
21st-century American historians
American sinologists
Free software programmers
Dartmouth College faculty
Swarthmore College alumni
People from Lima, Ohio
American women historians
Historians of China
Women orientalists
21st-century American women