A well-known peculiarity of the field of Vietnamese history is that there are very few English-language histories of the country which provide any kind of detailed treatment of the pre-colonial period, and the number of these written by scholars who know the Vietnamese language is even smaller. (In fact, the most comprehensive Western-language history of Vietnam before French colonisation remains Le Thanh Khoi's Histoire du Viet Nam: des origines a 1858 [Paris: Sudestasie, 1981]). TruWng Bftu Lam, best-known for his collected translations of key source materials for Vietnamese history, has helped to fill this gap with his Story of Viet Nam. Roughly one-third of the book covers the period before 1858; more than half of the remaining material focuses on colonialism and anti-colonialism, and the remainder covers the decades since 1954.
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