South Vietnam and the Free Chinese World
I was looking at an issue of a kind of magazine/newsletter that the South Vietnamese Embassy in the US used to publish called Viet-Nam Bulletin. In 1969 there was an…
The Siamese Semicoloniamperial Gaze
The idea that Siam/Thailand was never colonized is one that is still expressed a lot in popular discourse but is no longer taken seriously by many academics. The evidence that…
“Dealing with” “the Problem” of Filipinos in Honolulu in 1917
I came across an article that the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote in 1917 about the “appalling” conditions in the “tenement districts” to the west of Nuuanu Stream in…
The Diary of an Infiltrator
Looking around more in the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University I came across a short English-language text from 1966 called Diary of an Infiltrator. It is not actually…
Singing “Ode to the Motherland” on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail
I was looking around in the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University today when I started to come across “infiltrator diaries.” That is how the diaries of North Vietnamese…
Demystifying Mainland Southeast Asia
There is an edited volume that was published a year ago called Demystifying China: New Understandings of Chinese History. It contains 24 chapters and the authors of each chapter attempt…
Mother’s Little Helper in the Philippines in the 1930s
It’s a well-known fact that it is not easy to be a mother, and that every mom needs some help from time to time (or every day). In the 1960s…
Assumptions and Blurred Lines in Vietnamese Historical Scholarship
Today I was looking at a work that was published in 1985, the History of Vietnam (Lịch sử Việt Nam). The first chapter deals with archaeological information and the second…