https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_K_sFrQ9hs The above video is a discussion of Nguyễn Đăng Thục’s essay “The Origins of the Vietnamese People,” which was published in either the 1960s or early 1970s by the…
In my ongoing effort to experiment with ways in which digital media can enhance the efforts of historians to examine and talk about the past, I am particularly pleased to begin a new series of videos that I will call “Streaming From Saigon.”
The purpose of these videos will be to introduce ideas that were discussed by Vietnamese historians in the 1950s-1970s.
This is a meditation on the “Nam quốc sơn hà,” strangeness in history, Benedict Anderson, language learning, the “Bình Ngô đại cáo,” Soviet soldiers, Tạ Chí Đại Trường, and the…
I spent some time today looking at a magazine that was published in the US in the 1930s and 1940s under the name of Asia and Asia and the Americas. (more…)
A few weeks ago I drove through a town in northern Vietnam that sold local milk products. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm but who is now lactose-intolerant, it felt somewhat surreal to watch my Vietnamese travel companions happily slurp down freshly made goats’ milk yogurt while I stood and watched. . . but ultimately this all made me wonder about the history of the dairy industry in that region.
Clearly dairy farms are not a “traditional Vietnamese” industry, and therefore, it must be the case that this is an industry that was introduced during the colonial period, but I was curious to know some of the details about the actual history of the introduction of the dairy industry into Vietnam.
There is a book that was compiled in fifteenth century Vietnam called the Treatise on the Territory (Dư địa chí 輿地誌). This work was supposedly initially compiled by the scholar-official Nguyễn Trãi, but the versions that exist today also contain information that later scholars added.
The way this text is usually talked about in Vietnam today is as an example of any early “geography” or as a work of “historical geography.” As one scholar put it, Nguyễn Trãi’s text planted the seed that would eventually lead to the development of the field of “the historical geography of the Vietnamese people.” (Lần đầu tiên, Nguyễn Trãi đã đặt nền mống xây dựng khoa địa lý lịch sử của dân tộc Việt. . .)