Vietnam

I keep coming across writings in English in which people talk about how Việt Nam came to be called Việt Nam, and nobody has the story right. Humility aside, the…

It’s well known that one of the ways that the US started to support South Vietnam in 1954 was through propaganda. Edward Lansdale is the person who is usually associated…

Back in the late 1980s I was friends with a guy who was the manager of a failing rock band in the Soviet Union. The band he managed was not…

Looking around again in the US National Archives through the Online Public Access portal, I found this letter from Hồ Chí Minh. To quote the description on the web page,…

I came across this nice map of Vietnam in 1890 that the Library of Congress (LOC) has digitized. This then made me think about all of the wonderful old Vietnamese…

If you want to understand the past, you have to engage in comparative history. If you just study about one place, then you cannot possibly gain an accurate understanding of…

As the post below indicates, there were many different morality books (thiện thư/shanshu 善書) that were produced in the past, but ultimately there was one that was the most popular,…

Before nationalism pushed him into the back room around 1950, Wenchang Dijun/Văn Xương Đế Quân 文昌帝君 was the main spirit honored at Ngọc Sơn Temple in Hanoi. Guansheng Dijun/Quan Thánh…