A long-time reader of this blog, “Saigon Buffalo,” shared information and documents that he discovered concerning religious descrimination towards Buddhists during the period of Ngô Đình Diệm’s presidency in South…
In the previous post I wrote about an impression that one can get from viewing the interior design of the Independence Palace (Dinh Độc Lập) in Saigon.
Viewing the rooms in the bunker (the basement), on the other hand, can bring about other impressions and feelings.
In Honolulu, one can visit the USS Missouri, the ship on which the Japanese, in Tokyo Bay, formally signed the surrender documents that ended World War II in Asia on September 2, 1945, the very same day that, in Hanoi, Hồ Chí Minh declared Vietnam to be independent.
That ship has many empty rooms like the ones that are in the basement of the Independence Palace.
In both cases, those empty rooms can elicit complex feelings.
I have seen many pictures of Independence Palace, but I’d never seen those empty rooms until I visited this historical site. Below are some pictures that I took of those rooms.
They are as important to this building as the official meeting rooms and the hip entertainment room. (more…)
As someone who is interested in architecture and “coolness,” I decided to spend some time this summer looking at the Independence Palace (Dinh Độc Lập) in Saigon, as this is a structure that was clearly built to be cool.
Having just read and enjoyed the graphic novel, “Such A Lovely Little War,” but having never heard of its author, Marcelino Truong, I decided to contact him and ask him a few questions about his book.
What follows is an “interview” that we conducted over email.
Over the past few weeks the New York Times has published a series of essays in a series called “Vietnam ‘67” in which “Historians, veterans and journalists recall 1967 in Vietnam, a year that changed the war and changed America.”
The historians who have written for this series (Fredrik Logevall, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Christopher Goscha, Heather Stur, Sean Fear, Mark Atwood Lawrence, etc.) are all scholars who did not experience the war directly. They are from a “post-war” generation, and that distance from the war is one factor that makes their scholarship different from that of scholars who experienced the war, and/or who wrote in response to the war.
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…
I was saddened to learn yesterday that South Vietnamese historian Tạ Chí Đại Trường has passed away. I never had the good fortune of meeting Tạ Chí Đại Trường, but…
As an historian, I find the end of wars to be fascinating historical moments, because they are times when one world comes to an end and another world has to…
Anne Scahill is an American woman who served in a non-governmental organization in South Vietnam from 1970 to 1973 called the Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS).During that time she took many…
I recently came across a small booklet that the South Vietnamese government published in English in 1973 entitled Vietnamese Studies and Their Relationship to Asian Studies. Written by Nguyễn Khắc…