John Wolfe DardessJanuary 17, 1937–March 31, 2020 Ruth W. Dunnell On March 31, 2020, the community of Chinese historians lost a distinguished, pioneering, and prolific scholar of Yuan and Ming history with the passing of John Dardess. An active member of the University of Kansas Department of History from 1966 until his retirement in 2002, Dardess was an engaged scholar and mentor up to his death. His lifelong study of the Ming dynasty produced nine books on diverse topics across the centuries of Ming rule, the last of which was posthumously published,1 numerous substantive articles, and dozens of book reviews. Although Dardess cherished his privacy, he was generous with his gifts and his absence is felt keenly by former colleagues and students at the University of Kansas. One remarked, "I had tremendous respect for him and was always in awe of his ability to read Ming historical documents, which to me were not so easy to decipher, but which he could take and turn into rich, interesting, and very readable narrative."2 A graduate student whom Dardess agreed to tutor in nineteenth-century Qing sources confessed: "watching him read through Zuo Zongtang without need of a dictionary remains a thrilling memory."3 Dardess's career in Ming studies began with an exploration of its origins in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; these early publications on Yuan history remain essential references for scholars in the field today. Readers will find a detailed obituary by Sarah Schneewind, reviewing his Ming work, along with a bibliography of his publications compiled by Vickie Fu Doll, in Ming Studies 82 (2020). This remembrance will focus on Dardess's scholarship on the Yuan and the Yuan-Ming transition, and the legacy of his work to that field. [End Page ix] John Dardess unapologetically declared himself committed to exploring the political history of the Ming era, a choice not much in fashion in recent decades. Yet his body of work and impeccable scholarship demonstrate the capaciousness of the field and the rewards of tilling it. His commitment was a product of his own origins, coming of age at the beginning of the Cold War. As Dardess explained in a December 2011 interview, his life-long interest in political history and autocrats began at age seven or eight, when his father served as a surgeon under General Patton in France after D-Day.4 "Adolf Hitler and his god-awful political military machine" was something he could "feel, touch, and smell" from the battlefield souvenirs his hero-father sent home to him. Hitler died but Stalin lived, until 1953, while Mao was still too remote (it is difficult for scholars born after 1960 or so to grasp how utterly cut off Americans were from China from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s). So Dardess studied Russian language and history at Georgetown, earning a B.A. there in 1958. Then the U.S. Army Language School introduced him to Chinese and sent him to Taiwan in ca. 1959–60. Dardess's subsequent arrival at Columbia University, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1968, coincided with the birth of Ming studies and the Ming Biographical History Project, to which he contributed biographies of several late Yuan figures.5 His participation in Wm. Theodore de Bary's seminar on Chinese thought left an indelible impression on classmates such as historians Ted (Edward) Farmer and Morris Rossabi, who noted his qualities of modesty, humor, and extraordinary aptitude for the most impenetrable classical Chinese texts.6 In Dardess's view, Zhu Yuanzhang (Hongwu, Ming Taizu) bore striking similarities to the founding dictators of the twentieth century. To understand the Ming founder required probing the conditions from which he emerged. His early work on the Mongol-Yuan and the fourteenth-century transitional era illustrates the breadth of his scholarship: •. "The Transformations of Messianic Revolt and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty." Journal of Asian Studies 29.3 (May 1970): 539–558. •. "From Mongol Empire to Yüan Dynasty: Changing Forms of Imperial Rule [End Page x] in Mongolia and Central Asia." Monumenta Serica 30.1 (1972–73): 117–165. •. Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan...
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May 7, 2024
Denisa Latić + 3
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