This article examines how builders and users contested the cultural, political, and social mission and meaning of the Hà Nội Central Library [Bibliothèque centrale de Hanoi] from 1919 to 1941. I argue that the central library was not just a symbol of Western modernity, but a public space in which modern practices were defied and defined by Vietnamese students, urban readers, and administrators. Library readers freely accessed diverse print matter, practiced self-directed learning, and created a social space for study, research, and leisure. Through this historical study, I reveal how the library was a contested colonial institution and a formative space of urban social life.

The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

The story of how Theravada Buddhism came to be adopted among urban Kinh communities in southern Vietnam challenges how scholars narrate Buddhist history. Focusing on the transformation of a single liturgical text—a chant, originally in the Pali language, to invite a monk to give a sermon—as it circulates across Thailand and Cambodia before its eventual translation from Khmer into Vietnamese in the mid-twentieth century, this essay reveals how chants grow as they circulate, how Theravada liturgies unsettle distinctions between classical and vernacular languages, and how ritual and ideological necessities shape translation in new cultural contexts.

This article examines how builders and users contested the cultural, political, and social mission and meaning of the Hà Nội Central Library [Bibliothèque centrale de Hanoi] from 1919 to 1941. I argue that the central library was not just a symbol of Western modernity, but a public space in which modern practices were defied and defined by Vietnamese students, urban readers, and administrators. Library readers freely accessed diverse print matter, practiced self-directed learning, and created a social space for study, research, and leisure. Through this historical study, I reveal how the library was a contested colonial institution and a formative space of urban social life.

The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

This paper examines an institution called Review and Selection, which facilitated the tasks of tax collection and military conscription in early modern Vietnam. Through a comparative examination of this institution’s history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Lê/Trịnh realm of Đàng Ngoài in the north and the Nguyễn domain of Đàng Trong in the south, this paper challenges ideas in extant English-language scholarship that claim that Đàng Trong was less bureaucratic, less Confucian, and more militarized than that of the Lê north. In the process, it offers some new characterizations of early modern Vietnam.

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequences from the diasporic Vietnamese literary archive: Vietnamese French author Ly Thu Ho’s trilogy and Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao’s pair of historical novels. Taking a historicist approach, the essay reveals complex nationalist expressions, aspirations, challenges, and desires in Ly Thu Ho’s and Lan Cao’s works of fiction.

The author served as sole language interpreter for the first US Marine helicopter squadron to operate in Vietnam. During 1962–1964, marines had their first limited exposure to what would become a massive combat trial. Marr describes daily base operations, combat support missions, and interactions with diverse people. He subsequently participated in Vietnam intelligence activities at Camp Smith in Hawai‘i, where young officers debated the efficacy of counterinsurgency efforts.