American historian at UMass Amherst who wrote Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and Imperial Twilight — providing narrative accounts of the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars respectively, making 19th century Chinese history accessible to general audiences.
Made the Taiping Rebellion accessible as the largest civil war in history — Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom's account of the Taiping Rebellion (20 million dead, Christian millenarian ideology, near-destruction of the Qing dynasty) brought this underknown cataclysm to English-language readers.
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