Dear Subscribers, History Enthusiasts and Friends
We have updated Citizen Historian with five new entries for the month of
June…
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Is there such a thing as the Olympic Salute? First up is Tan Chye Guan’s
take on the disappearance of a hauntingly familiar salute from the Olympic
Games. He shows how an event can be uncomfortably erased from memory -
Historical… »

The latest work from Tan Pin Pin Invisible City opens 19 July 2007 with free screenings at NUS followed by a commercial run at The Arts House. Tan Pin Pin, one of Singapore’s best known filmmakers, directed the critically and commercially acclaimed Singapore GaGa as well as the multi award-winning Moving House. She now turns… »

by Seng Yu Jin
1. Having watched the play Georgette, what do you think of the playwright’s depiction of Georgette’s early life? How realistic is any of it?
First and foremost, it is the prerogative of the playwright to exercise his imagination in the depiction of Georgette Chen. The play should therefore, not be judged… »

by Melisa Leong
While Georgette Chen is well known as an artist, few may understand how she was like as a close friend and a relative. After she passed away in 1993, one of her friends gathered up her personal correspondence and donated them to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). Currently interning with SAM, I have… »

by Edgar Liao
Finding History in a Theatre Studies class remains one of the pleasant surprises of my undergraduate career. Taught by Dr K. K. Seet, TS 3235 (Singapore English-Language Theatre) primarily surveys the history of English-language theatre in Singapore through the examination of the canonical works of nine significant local playwrights over three decades of… »

by Kevin Lee, with additional research by Ho Chi Tim
Off Dunearn Road is a road with a picturesque name: Jalan Kampong Chantek. This road (jalan) once led to a to a pretty (chantek) village (kampong).

A search on Google throws up over 500 mentions of the road name, mostly relating to property sales and international schools… »

by Tan Chye Guan
While the disappearance of the Olympic Salute after the infamous Berlin Games of 1936 is understandable, its absence in official and academic sources dealing with the inter-war Olympic movement is rather puzzling. No authoritative work has ever established that there ever was such a ritual in modern times.

The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC)… »

 Things left unsaid.
One spark that inspired us to start this project was all the little golden leftovers that got edited out. Sometimes it’s a hilarious anecdote that would have annoyed a then-important person (or paymaster!), or a snippet that didn’t fit the overall thesis and argument. Or a tale just too R-rated for a country with… »