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…
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…
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…
I just came across a fascinating document in the US National Archives from 1961 called “Snapshots at Random” by Jane Schnell. I do not know the context in which the…
For better or for worse, English has become “the” global language. This is very much evident in Southeast Asia where English proficiency is being promoted as key to the integration…
Buddhist-Muslim violence is taking place in Burma right now. I haven’t followed this issue closely, but at first it looked to me like a localized issue in the Rakhine State.…
I’ve written a few times on this blog about Senkesin (here, here and here) a kind of medicine that was sold in Southeast Asia that offered a cure for many…
I’ve been in situations where I have been amazed at what I see as an almost encyclopedic knowledge that many Vietnamese scholars have about the work of other Vietnamese scholars.…
As is well known, during the colonial period, various European scholars came to envision a process in the past where Southeast Asia came to be influenced by outside forces. In…
The period of the 1930s was a relatively calm period in Southeast Asia. There are at least a couple of reasons for why this was the case. First, many anti-colonial…