James C. Thomson, Jr.

Who was James C. Thomson, Jr.?

James Claude "Jim" Thomson Jr. was an American statesman, historian and journalist.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, to parents only temporarily home from China, where his father taught chemistry at Nanking University. He soon moved with them and his siblings to Nanjing. His siblings were Anne, Sydney, and John, and he was a friend and brother in law to theologian Robert McAfee Brown, Sydney's husband.

Thomson returned to the United States as a student at Lawrenceville School. He traveled through China with a friend in the summer of 1948, when Mao Zedong's revolution was gathering force. In 1953 he graduated with a B.A. from Yale University, where he was editor of the Yale Daily News. As a Yale-Clare Fellow at Cambridge University, he received a B.A. in history in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1961 under the direction of John K. Fairbank. He married his wife, Diana, in 1959. He was a lecturer in history at Harvard University starting in 1970, and taught a popular undergraduate course in American-East Asian Relations. In 1972 he was appointed curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism. He then taught at Boston University from 1984 until 1997.