Content creator recommends S'pore history and literature

Who: Mr Dhevarajan Devadas, 34, has a knack for making doom-scrollers on social media sit up to learn about Singapore history. The public policy analyst by day also creates history content on his TikTok account (@historyogi), which has over 120,000 followers. He hosts the Historyogi podcast series, where he interviews historians, scholars and writers.

- Shawn Hoo

"For someone who wants to learn more about Singapore history, I would begin with Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer Or Reformer by Syed Hussein Alatas. It gets one thinking about Raffles' role beyond the founding of modern Singapore and interrogates his troubling colonial legacy.

I would then turn to Lee's Lieutenants, edited by Kevin Y.L. Tan and Lam Peng Er, which details the collective efforts of the Old Guard leadership in building up Singapore. We learn how these individuals, each a leader in his own right, worked together and argued with one another on the best ways to make Singapore succeed.

The two-part memoirs of Singapore's founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew then give us an extensive insight into his perspective on the country's early post-colonial years and the deeply held beliefs that guided his captaincy of the Old Guard.