Knight Biggerstaff
American historian of China
Knight Biggerstaff (Chinese: 毕乃德; 1906–2001) was an American historian of China.
Education
Biggerstaff was born in Berkeley, California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1927. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1934. He was the first Harvard-Yenching Fellow to study at Yenching University in Beijing, and later a Fulbright Scholar, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Career
Biggerstaff served the U.S. State Department as a China expert during World War II, becoming the Chinese language secretary at the U.S. embassy in Chongqing. In 1946, he assisted ultimately unsuccessful U.S. efforts to construct a peace plan to avert the Chinese Civil War.
In the 1950s, in part because of his status as an expert on China, he was branded a communist sympathizer by Senator Joseph McCarthy, an accusation which took years to fight off - a feat at which he was ultimately successful.
Much of his academic career was spent at Cornell University, where he chaired the Department of Asian Studies from 1946 to 1956, helping to create the university's China (now East Asia) and Southeast Asia programs. He also chaired Cornell's history department from 1956 to 1963. Biggerstaff also helped to launch a quarterly journal, now The Journal of Asian Studies.
“Knight Biggerstaff” enters the record as american historian of China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Knight, Biggerstaff and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Knight Biggerstaff” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Knight, Biggerstaff and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q23691951. VIAF identifies the subject as 110861183. The Library of Congress control number is n80005785. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1906, 2001, 1927 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Knight Biggerstaff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.