Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ 1965 song “Wooly Bully” was a major hit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_412V1aYYXw The song’s lyrics, however, make very little sense. Here is the first verse: “Matty told…
In 1886, D. D. Daly, the Assistant Resident of Dent Province in British North Borneo administered an oath of allegiance to various groups of Murut and Peluan headhunters. This is…
When we attempt to understand the past, there are two things that historians have to do that are very important, and they are interrelated. 1. First, we have to try…
There is a theory that has developed over the past few decades among anthropologists and historians that is known as “the stranger king theory.” What this theory tries to explain…
I was looking through the Imperial War Museum again and came across this picture of a “BLU-3 anti-personnel (‘Pineapple’) Bomblet.” I was immediately reminded of a scene in a movie…
On 20 November 1903, T. C. H. Arensma, the general manager of a major tobacco plantation on the east coast of British North Borneo, Darvel Bay Estates, arrived back with…
As is very well known, on July 19, 1947, Burmese nationalist leader, Aung San, and six other members of his transitional government were assassinated. A rival politician, U Saw, was…
A few days ago a reader suggested that we take a look at another map, this one being of the Mekong Delta and Cambodia. That map is also included in…
Ros Sereysothea was the most famous female singer in Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Known as the “Golden Voice of the Royal Capital,” she recorded an enormous number…
The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has restored and digitized a seventeenth-century Chinese map known as “the Selden Map.” The map can be viewed here. A few weeks…