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Owen Lattimore (July 29, 1900 – May 31, 1989) was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he did not have an advanced academic degree, in the 1930s he was editor of ''Pacific Affairs'', a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate. In the early post-war period of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, American wartime "China Hands" were accused of being agents of the Soviet Union or under the influence of Marxism. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore in particular of being "the top Russian espionage agent in the United States."〔 The accusations led to years of Congressional hearings that did not substantiate the charge that Lattimore had been a spy (and wartime intercepted Venona cables decoded so far did not refer to him as one). The hearings did document Lattimore's sympathetic statements about Stalin and the Soviet Union, however. Although charges of perjury were dismissed, the controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the U.S. State Department and eventually to his career in American academic life. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England, where he taught Chinese History, richly flavoured with personal reminiscences. He died in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island, having resided in his later years in Pawtucket. Lattimore's "lifetime intellectual project", notes one recent scholar, was to "develop a 'scientific' model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate and interact with one another along 'frontiers'." He eclectically absorbed and often abandoned influential theories of his day that dealt with the great themes of history. These included the ecological determinism of Ellsworth Huntington; biological racism, though only to the extent of seeing characteristics which grew out of ecology; the economic geography and location theory; and some aspects of Marxist modes of production and stages of history, especially through the influence of Karl August Wittfogel. The most important and lasting influence, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died. Lattimore's most influential book, ''The Inner Asian Frontiers of China'' (1940), used these theories to explain the history of East Asia not as the history of China and its influence on its neighbors, but as the interaction between two types of civilizations, settled farming and pastoral, each of which had its role in changing the other. ==Early life== Although born in the United States, Lattimore was raised in Tianjin, China, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore. One of his sisters was the children's author Eleanor Frances Lattimore.) After being schooled at home by his mother, he left China at the age of twelve and attended schools in Switzerland and St Bees School, England (1915–1919), but returned in 1919 when it turned out that he would not have enough funds for attending university. He worked first for a newspaper and then for a British import/export related business. This gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in China and time to study Chinese with an old-fashioned Confucian scholar. His commercial travels also gave him a feel for the realities of life and the economy. A turning point was negotiating the passage of a trainload of wool through the lines of two battling warlords early in 1925, an experience which led him the next year to follow the caravans across Inner Mongolia to the end of the line in Xinjiang.〔Lattimore, Owen (1928) ''The Desert Road to Turkestan''; pp. 5-8. He euphemistically describes the experience as being "sent 'up-country' once to try to get hold of some wool".〕 The managers of his firm saw no advantage in subsidizing his travels but did send him to spend a final year of employment with them in Beijing as government liaison. During this year in Beijing before departing on his expedition, he met his wife, Eleanor Holgate. For their honeymoon they planned to travel from Beijing to India, he overland, she by rail across Siberia, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century. In the event, the plans were disrupted and she had to travel alone by horse-drawn sled for in February to find him. She described her journey in ''Turkestan Reunion'' (1934), he in ''The Desert Road to Turkestan'' (1928) and ''High Tartary'' (1930). This trip laid the ground for his lifelong interest in all matters related to the Mongols and other peoples of the Silk Road. Upon his return to America in 1928, he succeeded in receiving a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for further travel in Manchuria, then for the academic year 1928/1929 as a student at Harvard University. He did not, however, enroll in a doctoral program, but returned to China 1930-1933 with fellowships from the Harvard–Yenching Institute and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was awarded the Patron's Gold Medal by the British Royal Geographical Society in 1942 for his travels in Central Asia.〔 (【引用サイトリンク】 title=List of Past Gold Medal Winners ) 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Owen Lattimore」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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