Huang Renyu, (Ray Huang) was born on June 25^th, 1918 in Hunan province.[i] He briefly attended the Nankai University in Tianjin as an engineering student, and dropped out two years after due to the WWII.[ii] Huang then started his service at the Republican Chinese Army where he was a journalist in India.[iii] After the WWII, Huang was first sent to United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1946, and worked as a military consultant at the General Staff Headquarters at the Republican China after the graduation.[iv] Huang returned to the U.S. in the 1950s and attended the University of Michigan.[v] Huang studied at many programs at the University, and eventually received his Ph.D. in History in 1964.[vi] Upon graduating from the University of Michigan, he taught at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and the State University of New York at New Paltz for many years.[vii] Huang was also selected to be an editor for the Science and Civilization in China book series at the University of Cambridge, England, and one of the authors in The Cambridge History of China, where he focuses on the history of Ming Dynasty.[viii] He died at the age 82 out of a heart attack in New York.[ix]

He advocated the concept of Macrohistory (large, long-term trends in world history, searching for ultimate patterns through a comparison of proximate details[x]) through his writings, which have introduced a new and profound view on history to China. His representative publications are including: 1587, a Year of No Significance [万历十五年] (1981), China: A Macro History [中国大历史] (1988), and Conversation on Chinese History by the Hudson River [赫逊河畔谈中国历史] (1997).