After graduating from Boston Latin School in 1937 and Harvard College in 1941, Levenson enlisted in the United States Navy in 1942.
He attended Japanese Language School and saw active service in the Solomon Islands and Philippines campaigns.
[1] Levenson earned a number of awards and prizes, including Fulbright (1954–55), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1958–59); Guggenheim (1962–63); and the American Council of Learned Societies (1966–67).
In honor of his scholarly and pedagogical contributions, two awards are made in his name: the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies offers the Joseph Levenson Book Prize[2] and one by Harvard University for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Paul Cohen commented in his study of American historical writing on China, Discovering History in China, that Levenson addressed "the issues of modernization and cultural change more persistently, imaginatively, and, for many of his readers, persuasively than perhaps any other American historian of China in the immediate postwar decades".