I’m reading Alfred McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). It is an impressive piece…
Just by chance I came across this picture of the Thai historian, Charnvit Kasetsiri, on facebook today. The text at the top says (and I translate it loosely here in…
Lester Maynard was appointed US consul at Sandakan in British North Borneo on 26 June 1906. In October of that year he learned that a German-born naturalized American citizen by…
Two emails came in this morning announcing the passing of two important men. Phạm Duy, one of the most important figures (some would say “the” most important figure) in twentieth-century…
I came across this image from Sài Gòn giải phóng (1 June 1975). The kid says, “Mom, those books are really beautiful!!” And the mother responds, “Truly beautiful, but those…
The study of “folk literature” (văn học dân gian) first began in Vietnam in the North in the 1950s. The approach that Vietnamese scholars at that time employed in studying…
There is a web page I liked called “The Art of Google Books.” Basically what the person who produces this page does is to look through books that have been…
In 2010, Google released its “Ngram Viewer” which allows people to search through many of the millions of books that it has scanned and to chart word usage over time.…
In an article that she wrote in 1989 on India in world’s fairs, Carol A. Breckenridge coined the phrase “Victorian ecumene” to refer to a transnational cultural world that “encompassed…
During the Fifth Reign (1873-1910) in Siam, the royal family became very interested in photography and a lot of pictures were taken at that time. These photographs are now fascinating…