Owen Lattimore – Wikipedia

Owen Lattimore (ca. 1945)

Owen Lattimore (Born July 29, 1900 in Washington, D.C.; † May 31, 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island) was an American sinologist and Mongolist. He became the victim of the McCarthy era in the 1950s and was appointed a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in 1969.

Studied, first trips and publications [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Lattimore, son of a businessman who worked in China, spent his early childhood in China and attended various schools in England and Lausanne before working as a merchant and journalist in China at the beginning of the 1920s. During this time he traveled through Mongolia and Manchuria and he returned to the USA, where he completed a degree at Harvard University. He then returned to China, where he married in Beijing Eleanor Holgate in 1925, who had studied at Northwestern University and worked as a teacher in China at the time.

Together with his wife, Lattimore undertook extensive trips to Central Asia at the end of the 1920s and subsequently published outstanding descriptions of his travels and observations such as The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928) and High Tartary (1930).

Between 1934 and 1941 he was editor of Pacific Affairs , a journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations and not only wrote during this time Mongolian Journeys (1941), but especially in 1940 his masterpiece Inner Asian Frontiers of China . In 1938 he also took over a professorship at John’s Hopkins University.

Second World War, consultant of Chiang Kai-Hek and Owi [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

During the Second World War, he worked for the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a consultant of Chiang Kai-Hek between 1941 and 1944. However, he resigned from this function because he failed to convince Chiang Kai-Hek of the implementation of a program for social justice.

From 1944 to 1945 he was employee of the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) and director of operations in the Pacific room there. He was one of the so -called during this time China Hands , the specialists of the Foreign Ministry for China.

Post-war period and victims of the McCarthy era [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

After the end of the war, he published numerous important columns on Central Asian topics that collected in Solution in China (1945) and The Situation in China (1949) published.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Lattimore, who took part in a UN mission in Afghanistan at the time, was in the course of the McCarthy era and the so-called second red fear under the suspicion of espionage for the Soviet Union. Finally, with him, Philip Jessup and John Stewart service and their work in the diplomatic service as well as for the left -handed magazine America Also the Tydings Committee described according to the democratic Senator Millard Tydings. He was given by the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy as “Top Soviet Agent in the United States” ( “Top agent of the Soviet Union in the United States”) identified as well as “Chief Architect of a United States Forign Policy that result in the communist party’s Conquest of Mainland China” (“Key architect of a US foreign policy, which was the result Communist Party [Chinas] conquered the [entire] Chinese mainland “). ^[first] However, Lattimore contested a supporter of communism or a supporter of communist interests. He presented the initial phase of the allegations against him in the autobiographical book Ordeal by Slander that appeared in 1950.

During this time there were five methods of meineid, whereby all procedures were discontinued despite the burden of other university teachers such as Nikolaus Poppe. In 1955, a US federal court finally rejected the allegations against him as informal and obscure.

Lattimore, which received a Guggenheim scholarship, became the first professor of sinology at the University of Leeds in 1963 ^[2] And taught this until his retirement in 1975. In 1969 he was the first foreigner to be appointed member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Due to his many years of teaching and author work, he is considered the father of Mongolistics and Central Asian studies in the USA and Great Britain, and more emphasized the Chinese studies on Chinese than to the western perspective.

In his numerous books, he dealt with central Asian issues such as Buddhism in Mongolia or the people of Hezhen ^[3] . In addition, he also wrote articles and introductions for the works of other authors such as for China shakes the world by Jack Belden. His estate is located in the Library of Congress. ^[4]

In honor of him, the bird basin was named Goyocephale Lattimorei in 1982. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1943. ^[5]

His younger brother was the poet and Bible translator Richmond Lattimore.

• The Desert Road to Turkestan (1928)
• High Tartary (1930)
• Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict: Cradle of Conflict (1932)
• The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (1934)
• Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940)
• Mongol Journeys (1941)
• The Making of Modern China: A Short History , Co -author Eleanor Holgate Lattimore (1944)
• Solution in Asia (1945)
• An Inner Asian Approach to the Historical Geography of China (1947)
• The Situation in Asia (1949)
• Ordeal by Slander , Memoiren (1950)
• Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia (1950)
• Nationalism and Revolution in Mongolia (1955)
• Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited (1962)
• Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928-1958 (1962)
• Silks, Spices, and Empire: Asia Seen Through the Eyes of Its Discoverers , Co -author Eleanor Holgate Lattimore (1968)

in German language

• Nomads and commissioners: Mongolia – yesterday and today , Stuttgart 1964

• John T. Flynn: The Lattimore Story , Devin-Adair, 1953
• James Cotton: Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate , Manchester University Press, 1989 ^[6]
• Robert P. Newman: Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China , University of California Press, 1992 ^[7]
• Lionel S. Lewis: The Cold War and Academic Governance: The Lattimore Case at Johns Hopkins , SUNY Press, 1993

1. ↑ McCarthy publicly attacks Owen Lattimore (This Day in History, 8. April 1950)
2. ↑ Department of Chinese Studies (Homepage der University of Leeds)
3. ↑ Owen Lattimore: The Gold tribe of the lower Sungari . In: Memoires of the American Anthropological Association 40, 1933, S. 1–77
4. ↑ Owen Lattimore Papers (Library of Congress)
5. ↑ Member History: Owen Lattimore. American Philosophical Society, accessed on January 4, 2019 .
6. ↑ Google Books
7. ↑ E-Book-Version