Pamela Kyle Crossley

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Pamela Kyle Crossley is an historian. Crossley was educated in Lima, Ohio, Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation under the direction of Jonathan Spence. Since 1993 she has been Professor of History at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. After David Farquhar and Gertraude Roth Li, Crossley was among the first scholars writing in English to use Manchu documents to research the history of the Qing. More scholars subsequently adopted this practice.

A leading historian of modern China, Crossley has written many books, including Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton University Press, 1990, also published in Chinese by People's University Press, 2007); The Manchus (Blackwells Publishers, 1997); A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (University of California Press, 1999, also published in Chinese by People's University Press, 2008). She is also a co-author of the best-selling global history textbooks, The Earth and its Peoples (Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edition, 2004) and Global Society: The World since 1900 (Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 2007). Crossley is a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the Association for Asian Studies Joseph R. Levenson Prize. Her work has been featured in The Cambridge History of China and The Cambridge History of Slavery. She is widely published in periodicals such as The New York Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Royal Academy Magazine, Far Eastern Economic Review and Calliope, and has participated in A&E's "In Search of..." series ("The Forbidden City").

Crossley is also a historian of the horse in Eurasia. She has been the first to describe a major change in saddle use and horsemanship that accounts for the strengths and weaknesses of both the Mongol and the Manchu cavalry. This has been reported at a major conference in Beijing as well as in presentations at University of Newcastle, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Willamette Universiy.

Crossley is noted for arguing that the Qing empire was not "sinicized," but was ruled in such a way as to integrate Chinese political values with those of Northeast Asia and Mongolia. She pointed out that Manchu language, religion, documents, and customs remained of great importance to the Qing until the middle nineteenth century. On the other hand, she argued that modern "ethnic" identities in China were the product of an interaction of imperial authority and education, social changes, community life, and individual consciousness. While she disagreed with earlier scholars that Manchus had been sinicized, she did not argue that Manchu culture in modern China was the traditional culture of Northeast Asia. Rather, it was a new product of the experience of individual Manchu communities in China itself, shaped by what she called "the sense of difference that has no outward sign" (Orphan Warriors', p.267). Her ideas have been generalized by her and others to an interpretation of modern nationalism as strongly influenced by the legacies of the early modern empires, particularly regarding the roles of language, religion and genealogy in identity. These ideas have been controversial.

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