Earl Pritchard

Background

Pritchard was born on June 5, 1907, in Pullman, Washington, where he spent his childhood on the farm of his father, Thomas Pritchard.

Education

He attended Washington State College and graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in 1928. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where completed his Master of Arts He spent three years at the University of Oxford and was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy in history in 1933. He studied Chinese at Columbia University and the University of Michigan between 1937 and 1939, but he later regretted that his Chinese did not reach the level of proficiency he felt any serious student of China should be.

Career

In 1929. After completing his doctoral dissertation, Pritchard taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon from 1934 until transferring to Washington State in 1935, where he stayed until 1937. Pritchard taught at Wayne State University in Detroit between 1939 and 1947. This stint was interrupted from 1942 to 1945 when he was a civilian analyst with military intelligence during the Second World War.

He was in charge of a 15-20 person group that studied Japanese transportation networks in China and Japan.

After the end of the war, he was an Associate Professor of history at the University of Chicago from 1947 until 1962. He was disappointed when the Fulbright Fellowship that he earned in 1948 to go to China was canceled because of the Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong that was sweeping away the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek at the time.

Pritchard never had an opportunity to visit the country he researched and taught about for most of his life, although he did travel to Japan in 1957. He moved to Tucson in Arizona to assume the chair of the Oriental Studies Department at the University of Arizona.

He significantly built up the program until his retirement in 1972.

He taught for several more years as Professor Emeritus. He was one of the founders of the Far Eastern Association, which later became the Association for Asian Studies. Se served as the president from 1962 to 1963, vice president from 1961 to 1962, was a director in 1948-1951, 1952-1955, and 1961-1964.

He died on May 9, 1995, in Tucson at the age of 87.

Achievements

• Returning to Pullman in 1930, he applied for a Rhodes Scholarship and became the second student from Washington State College to win the scholarship. He was the first recipient of the War Department"s highest award for intelligence service, the Distinguished Civilian Service Meda Pritchard was the founder and editor of the Bulletin of Far Eastern Bibliography, which became the Far Eastern Quarterly before assuming its present form as the Journal of Asian Studies. He cited the major achievements of his career as the foundation of what was to become the Association for Asian Studies and the Journal of Asian Studies, and secondly the growth of the oriental studies at the University of Arizona. He cited as his third most important achievement the publication of Anglo-Chinese Relations During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’’ (a compacted version of his Master of Arts thesis), The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations 1750- 1800 (based in part on his doctoral thesis, 1936), sections written for The American Historical Association"s Guide to Historical Literature (1961), the coauthoring of Volume 4 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development.