{"id":18377,"date":"2017-07-06T09:22:33","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T15:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18377"},"modified":"2017-07-06T09:22:33","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T15:22:33","slug":"billings-native-was-a-giant-of-asian-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/07\/billings-native-was-a-giant-of-asian-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"Billings native was a &#8216;giant&#8217; of Asian scholarship"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_18378\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 336px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"addboard wp-image-18378 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/Michael-Vickery.png\" alt=\"Vickery\" width=\"336\" height=\"224\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">A dashing Michael Vickery in his younger days.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>On countless occasions over the years, I&#8217;ve said to myself while reading someone&#8217;s obituary, &#8220;Why did I never hear of this person until now?&#8221;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I asked that question again today, reading a news-obituary in a newspaper I was previously unacquainted with, <a href=\"http:\/\/m.phnompenhpost.com\/\">The Phnom Penh Post<\/a>. The subject of\u00a0the piece was <a href=\"http:\/\/m.phnompenhpost.com\/national\/celebrated-historian-michael-vickery-dies-86\">Michael Vickery<\/a>, a native of Billings who died late last month in Cambodia&#8217;s\u00a0Battambang province.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;giant of Southeast Asian scholarship,&#8221; as he was called in the article, also seems to have been a character one might have encountered in an Ian Fleming novel. The second paragraph reads:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Colleagues, friends and family remembered him for his fierce intellect, unapologetic devotion to the truth, encyclopaedic memory and mastery of over a dozen languages, many of which\u2013it was said\u2013he picked up through various romances.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Born in 1931 in Billings, Vickery earned a doctorate from Yale and went on to teach and do research at universities in Australia, Malaysia and Cambodia. His major work appears to have been &#8220;Cambodia After Angkor: The Chronicular Evidence for the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He was also unafraid to speak his mind, apparently. In 2001 he wrote a letter to the editor of The Phnom Penh Post, characterizing a recent article as the &#8220;filthiest piece of pseudo-journalistic hack work and character assassination I have seen in years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia has <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_Vickery\">a good summary of his life<\/a>, but I would love to know more about him, particularly his years in Billings. I found nothing about him in the Gazette archives. If anyone has any information about him, we&#8217;re all ears.<\/p>\n<div class=\"well\"><div class=\"dfad dfad_pos_1 dfad_first\" id=\"_ad_652\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/mjhWkW\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/201703_capeair_variable.jpg\" alt=\"CapreAir_Variable\" width=\"510\" height=\"180\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-18069\" \/><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On countless occasions over the years, I&#8217;ve said to myself while reading someone&#8217;s obituary, &#8220;Why did I never hear of this person until now?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18378,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[6027,6026],"class_list":["post-18377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-cambodia","tag-michael-vickery","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18379,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18377\/revisions\/18379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}