ABSTRACT
For over forty years, first as his teaching assistant at Yale University and for the last twenty-six years as an intellectual collaborator at the University of Michigan, I have been privileged to study Southeast Asian history with John Whitmore. I have come to appreciate first-hand the range of his research interests, both chronological and thematic; his intellectual subtlety, his attention to corroborative detail, the originality of his regional vision, not to mention his productivity—a monograph, three co-authored volumes, another three edited or coedited volumes, plus some fifty articles and essays. Insofar as decades of scholarship can be compressed into a short essay, this paper seeks to explicate John’s influence on Vietnamese and Southeast Asian studies.
