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Burma background (updated)
By
Once again I must unavoidably be on the road, and away in particular from Chinese earthquake news and coverage, for the next six days.
In the meantime let me highlight and commend a series of articles from a Special Supplement on Burma that the Atlantic published in .... 1958.
That year our magazine published a 72-page section of perspectives on this one little country (the magazine biz was a little different in those days....), mainly written by Burmese themselves. Many addressed questions of national character, historic memory, the role of religion, etc that remain important today. Five of these essays, for a start, are now on line. Just because I know the Burmese-American novelist Wendy Law Yone, I point out that one is by her father, the prominent Burmese journalist U Law Yone.
It's a credit to the magazine that we published this material in the first place (under Edward Weeks, editor in those palmy days) and that, thanks to hard, fast work by Sage Stossel, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, and the Atlantic team of interns (Ben Carlson, Conor Friedersdorf, Theodore Kahn, Herschel Nachlis, Sara Tisdale), so much of this material went from printed form on crinkly 50-year-old paper to being digitized and online within about one day. I believe that more of it is to come. James Gibney's accompanying overview of the subject also is extremely good.
We hope this material is useful for Westerners trying to learn more about the country -- and, significantly, for members of the large English-speaking Burmese diaspora around the world, most of whom would never have seen these essays before.
Update: 16 articles now on line. Really, what can be found in the Atlantic's archives is incredible.
In the meantime let me highlight and commend a series of articles from a Special Supplement on Burma that the Atlantic published in .... 1958.
That year our magazine published a 72-page section of perspectives on this one little country (the magazine biz was a little different in those days....), mainly written by Burmese themselves. Many addressed questions of national character, historic memory, the role of religion, etc that remain important today. Five of these essays, for a start, are now on line. Just because I know the Burmese-American novelist Wendy Law Yone, I point out that one is by her father, the prominent Burmese journalist U Law Yone.
It's a credit to the magazine that we published this material in the first place (under Edward Weeks, editor in those palmy days) and that, thanks to hard, fast work by Sage Stossel, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, and the Atlantic team of interns (Ben Carlson, Conor Friedersdorf, Theodore Kahn, Herschel Nachlis, Sara Tisdale), so much of this material went from printed form on crinkly 50-year-old paper to being digitized and online within about one day. I believe that more of it is to come. James Gibney's accompanying overview of the subject also is extremely good.
We hope this material is useful for Westerners trying to learn more about the country -- and, significantly, for members of the large English-speaking Burmese diaspora around the world, most of whom would never have seen these essays before.
Update: 16 articles now on line. Really, what can be found in the Atlantic's archives is incredible.
