Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...missionaries lacked. It is not only because Fairbank's books are so widely read that David E. Kelley, a current graduate student in East Asian studies, says of the professor, "It's hard to see where his personal perspective ends and his influence on others begins." And James C. Thomson Jr., curator of the Nieman Foundation who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Fairbank, says "One of the things that is astonishing about this person is that as a mentor and guide and guru he adopts different styles for different disciples and clearly develops in his own mind different routes...
...Thomson's experience just after receiving his Ph.D. is an example of the empathy of his mentor. Having gone to work for the State Department in 1960, Thomson recalls he soon received "several nibbles" from Harvard and Yale to join the faculties there. But when he consulted Fairbank about the offers, Thomson says his teacher's reaction was only lukewarm. Thomson took this hesitancy as a cue: Fairbank felt his student should first complete his stint in government. But when Harvard's History Department approached Thomson again in 1966, Fairbank was there with open arms. "He felt it was time...
...East Asia," he has recited the series of questions members of McCarran's committee once fired at him with a characteristically Fairbankian sense of deadpan humor. But, as few who know him at all can fail to mention, Fairbank often compresses some of his most serious observations into what Thomson has called his "inscrutable wit." On the doorjamb of his wonderfully book-laden study in Widener, for instance, Fairbank has scrawled four words that are almost Chinese in their terseness: "People sometimes; book, never," the door reads. Fairbank's humorous but decidedly cynical meaning squeezed between the lines here...
...social change. As Benjamin I. Schwartz '38, Williams Professor of History and Political Science, who was one of Fairbank's graduate students after the war says, "Everyone would accept the view that we have a tendency to be culture-bound, but not everyone would stress it as much." And Thomson calls Fairbank an "historical pessimist" who "does not believe in the perfectibility of people or their institutions...
...redistricting plan, they will share a single representative with either upper or lower Cape Cod. Complaining that they will be deprived of an individual representative for the first time since the 17th century, some islanders threatened secession (TIME, March 21, 1977). New Hampshire's archconservative Governor Meldrim Thomson muddied the waters further by promising Nantucketers that he would give them "two or three representatives and maybe a senator" in Concord's legislature; he also pointed out that as undertaxed New Hampshirites, they would be able to buy the same bottle of Scotch that now costs...