Ray Huang (; 25 June 19188 January 2000) was a Chinese-American historian and philosopher who was an officer in the National Revolutionary Army and fought in the Burma Campaign. In 1964, Huang earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. He worked with Joseph Needham and was a contributor to Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. Huang taught history at universities in the US and the UK, and he is best known in his later years for the idea of macro-history. Early life Ray Huang was born in Ningxiang, Hunan Province, in 1918. He was the oldest of three children. His father, Huang Zhenbai (), was an early member of the revolutionary group Tongmenghui but became less active in the group over the years. Ray Huang grew up in Hunan and went on to study electrical engineering at Nankai University, Tianjin, in 1936. At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938, he returned to Changsha and wrote for the Anti-Japanese War Report (). Soon afterwards, Huang entered the Republic of China Military Academy () at Chengdu, Sichuan, and graduated in 1940. He was appointed a Second Lieutenant Platoon Leader in 1941 and was posted as a staff First Lieutenant stationed in India in 1942. He then was a Staff Major in the New First Army in the Burma Theater from 1943 to 1945. While in Burma, he was shot through the thigh but made a complete recovery. After the war he attended the US Army Staff College, graduated in 1947, and was aide-de-camp to the head of the Chinese military delegation participating in the Allied occupation of Japan from 1949 to 1950. However, with the loss of Mainland China in 1949, the Nationalist Army in Taiwan was purged of political opponents in 1950. Huang's superior in Japan was accused of Communist links and so Huang was discharged from the Nationalist Army in 1950, which ended his military career. Academic career Huang went to the United States to study Chinese history. At the University of Michigan, he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1957, and his doctorate in 1964. He was appointed visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1967, and a professor at the State University of New York, New Paltz Branch, from 1968 to 1980. He was a research fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard in