My dissertation – and eventual book – examines Vietnamese railroad workers as they become first a self-conscious craft community and then become politicized, mostly avoiding the Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviets but participating vigorously in strikes in 1937 before fading into the political background during the First Indochina War.
During research concerning railroad workers, I focused heavily on the former railroad workshops at Truong Thi, just outside of Vinh city. Of course, this brought me into contact with Vinh itself, and had me try to reconstruct its colonial past. This proved more difficult than one might imagine, because that the United States flattened the city and its environs between 1964 and 1972.
Here, I share some of the visual images that I have collected, either from colonial sources or from my own contemporary photographs from 1997, 2015, and 2017, using site locations drawn from three maps that I cannot publish because of copyright restrictions: Service géographique de l’Indochine. Vinh – Benthuy. Hanoi: Service géographique de L’Indochine, 1911, 1936. and United States. Indochina City Plans 1:5,000, Town Plan of Vinh AND Town Plan of Ben Thuy. Washington, D.C.: Army Map Service, 1955. I will add images as they become available. A YouTuber has made a similar, video effort here: https://youtu.be/eQEwAzyNhEU.
My colleague Christina Schwenkel has written on Vinh since World War II. era, through postcards, I try to provide some imagery about the colonial city in comparison to its contemporary (at least October 2017) self.
How did I generate these maps? I either created content in Microsoft Excel and uploaded the sheets as .xlsx or .csv files into Maps Marker 3.1.1 and then migrated it to Maps Marker 4.2 with the built-in migration tool OR I imported GeoJon files from .kml or .kmz files directly into Maps Marker 4.2 after using this handy-dandy conversion tool: https://geoconverter.hsr.ch/