Rushton, Peter H.

Dr. Rushton received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and took his M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford University. He came to UC Santa Cruz in 1984, after having taught at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Indiana University at Bloomington. From 1993-1997, he spent the second half of each academic year at Dartmouth College as Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese language and literature. In the summer, he accompanied groups of students from that campus to Beijing Normal University, where he taught history of Beijing for the Dartmouth program. It was while preparing this course that Dr. Rushton began uncovering reports of the puzzling defeat of a Han army of 300,000 by a Mongol force one-tenth that size. Chinese authorities in Ming history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, notably Professor Jinshu Ling, were equally intrigued by these findings and encouraged Dr. Rushton to pursue a full-length investigation of the conflict between the Han people and their Mongol conquerors.