Charles Oscar Hucker was an American historian and Sinologist who was a professor of Chinese language and history at the University of Michigan.
10 Facts About Charles Hucker
1.
2.
Charles Hucker was regarded as one of the foremost historians of Ming dynasty China and a leading figure in the promotion of academic programs in Asian Studies during the 1950s and 1960s.
3.
Charles Hucker taught at the University of Chicago, at the University of Arizona, and then at Oakland University before joining the University of Michigan in 1965, where he was the chair of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures.
4.
Charles Hucker was awarded an honorary doctorate of humanities from Oakland University in 1974, and in 1979 was among a small number of American scholars of Chinese history who visited scholarly centers in China under the joint auspices of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
5.
Charles Hucker saw the censorate as a third branch of government, on equal footing with the civil and military bureaucracies, beholden to the traditional state Confucian orthodoxy moreso than to any other component of the state apparatus.
6.
Charles Hucker chaired the Committee for the Ming Biographical Dictionary Project until the publication in 1976 of its target work, the Dictionary of Ming Biography, a two-volume English language reference work, to which he contributed twelve biographies.
7.
Charles Hucker authored China's Imperial Past, a history of Imperial China intended for general readership.
8.
At the time of his retirement from the University of Michigan in 1983, Charles Hucker was regarded as one of the foremost historians of imperial China.
9.
Charles Hucker wrote plays and short stories, several of which have been published or produced.
10.
Charles Hucker died on November 14,1994, in Odessa, Texas, at the age of 75.