Literature study on Singapore

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Since the founding of Singapore, many works, articles and books have been published, providing a variety of information into the history of Singapore. When reviewing whether the three sources of articles chosen are useful to the research of Singapore history, some parameters and definitions should be set. The term “scholar” in my definition, will refer to any person who is doing a research into the history of Singapore at a higher level. This will include history students at the university levels, historians and professors, etc. By setting the scope in which the term “scholar” refers to, it is easier to review whether the specific piece of article that is under review could be considered as being useful.

The following article, “Singapore: History” is an internet article. The article, which is published on the internet, comes from the book “Singapore 1994”. The book itself is provided by the Embassy of Singapore in Washington D.C. Judging from the origins of the article; it could be argued that there is a certain level of accuracy in terms of its recounting of the Singapore history. However, although the information stated in the article is of high accuracy in terms of the dates, factual information and chronological narration of Singapore’s major events, the origins of the article, date of publication and its author is unknown. This could put the credibility of the source in doubt. This is especially so when a student who has completely no background knowledge of Singapore’s history. The student might have some difficulty in accessing its accuracy since the article did not have any author or origins to refer to. For an academic scholar researching on the history of Singapore, he would definitely have no problem in accessing the accuracy of the source, since he has a prior knowledge of the facts and information. However, as the article is too general, it would not have been of much help to the scholar in his scholarly research on Singapore. The article would be more useful to students who are doing some study into Singapore’s history and have enough knowledge to conclude that the article is of certain level of accuracy.

The article however does provide a comprehensive, short and simple narration of the history of Singapore since her founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, up till 1990 when the second prime minister, Goh Chok Tong took over the office from Lee Kuan Yew. The article stops in 1990 as it believes that a “new chapter” of Singapore’s modern history had begun with Prime Minister Goh taking over. Hence, although it has not been mentioned when this article was written, one could make a guess that it could have been written when Prime Minister Goh had just taken over the office from Lee Kuan Yew. The kind of “history” written in this article could be argued to be the official kind of history which the government would want the nation to believe in, that the history of modern Singapore began in 1819 with Sir Stamford Raffles’ landing at the mouth of the Singapore River.  

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The article does not provide much opportunity for any forms of intellectual discussion or questioning of the developments of the Singapore history as it is too brief and simplistic. There is no major in-depth discussion of intellectual content with regards to the developments of Singapore as compared to the other two articles under review. Scholars who wished to conduct an intellectual and in depth research on Singapore’s history would not find this article of any use to them. Many details have been omitted from this article. The developments of Singapore since its founding up till the 1990s are each given ...

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