Iris Shun-Ru Chang (simplified Chinese: 张纯如; traditional Chinese: 張純如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú; March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American historian and journalist. She was best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biographical book, Finding Iris Chang, as well as the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanki...
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Iris Shun-Ru Chang (simplified Chinese: 张纯如; traditional Chinese: 張純如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú; March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American historian and journalist. She was best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biographical book, Finding Iris Chang, as well as the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.
The daughter of two mainland China-born university professors who emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at...
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