Collecting area: China

Charles Lewis Whipple was a noted journalist, editor, and the first ombudsperson for the Boston Globe. As a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Whipple joined the Young Communist League, carrying his radical politics with him when he joined the Globe’s staff in 1936 and became an active member of the American Newspaper Guild. Although classified as unfit for military duty due to the loss of vision in one eye, Whipple joined the Red Cross during the Second World War, and served with distinction with over thirty months of overseas service. After returning to civilian life and severing ties with the Communist Party, he resumed his position at the Globe, rising steadily to become editor of the opinion page in 1962 and ombudsperson in 1975. An editorial he wrote in 1967 is considered the first editorial in a major American newspaper to oppose the war in Vietnam. Although he formally retired from the Globe in 1979. Whipple worked an additional three years with the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China’s first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991, following complications from surgery.

A mixture of personal and professional correspondence, writing, and subject and clipping files, the Charles Whipple Papers document a long and exceptional career in journalism. The diverse roles that Whipple filled at the Boston Globe from the 1930s through 1970s resulted in rich documentation of his work as an organizer for the American Newspaper Guild on the eve of the Second World War; his writing and editorial work during the Vietnam War and as the Globe’s Ombudsman in the 1970s; and the three years he spent in China setting up an English-language newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

An important scholar of field of fluid dynamics, Chia-Shun Yih was born in Guizhou Province, China, in 1918. Despite the disruptions of war, he completed his undergraduate work in engineering at National Central University in Nanjing in 1942 and was working in Sichuan Province when he received a governmental scholarship to continue his education in the U.S. in 1945. His theoretical work in nonhomogeneous fluid dynamics that began with his dissertation at the University of Iowa (1948) fueled a long and distinguished career, primarily at the University of Michigan. Yih died of heart failure in 1997.

This small collection features slides taken by Yih, an early member of Science for the People, during two trips to the People’s Republic of China. He and his wife Katherine traveled to PRC as guests of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in June and July 1972, shortly after the Nixon-era detente between the countries, but during the Cultural Revolution, and he returned in 1981.