Watch out Thailand!! They’re Coming!!!
Spending yet more time looking around in the US National Archives through the Online Public Access portal, I came across some other good examples of American Cold War propaganda. This…
Sappy Love Songs and the Meaning of Mainland Southeast Asian History During the Cold War
In 1966 John Denver wrote the song “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” When I was growing up, I didn't like that song. The version I heard the most when I…
Street Art and a Glocal Sense of Place in Bangkok
Graffiti can be found (to at least some extent) in pretty much every major city around the world, and Bangkok is no exception. However, I was surprised recently when I…
Thai and Chinese Attitudes Towards Administering Laxative Tablets in 1930s Southeast Asia
I came across this advertisement a few years ago in a Thai newspaper from the 1930s. It shows a woman “administering help” to her child. The child is unable to…
Thailand in American Soap Operas
Brigham Young University has a very interesting website (here) that allows you to do word searches in various databases, one of which contains the scripts from American soap operas from…
The Death and Afterlife of the Public Phone in Southeast Asia
I was in the Rangoon airport a while ago when I came across this scene here. It is a space for some kind of public phone, but there is no…
A Letter from Lord of Thailand Tengku Abdullah Osman
On 21 October 1945, Lord of Thailand Tengku Abdullah Osman sent a letter to “Mr. D. Headley, Lieutnent (sic) Colonel & Chief Commander Civil Affairs, Trengganu Government.” Headley probably found…
The Isaan Vietnamese in 1970
In 1999, Christopher Goscha published a pioneering study called Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution (1885-1954) in which he looked at the importance of places outside…
From Chinese to American by Conquest in Siam
In 1898, shortly after US naval forces had captured Manila, a man of Chinese ethnicity arrived at the port in Bangkok on a boat from Manila and claimed to be…
The Han Style and Power Dressing in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
I pointed out a long time ago on this blog (here) that there are nineteenth-century Vietnamese texts that refer to Vietnamese as “Hán” 漢. In responding to a question by…