Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of the World's Largest Archipelago

Indonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and has the fourth largest population in the world after the United States. Indonesian history and culture are especially relevant today as the Island nation is an emerging power in the region with a dynamic new leader. It is a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes that has a long and rich history stretching back a thousand years and more.

Indonesia is the fabled Spice Islands of every school child's dreams--one of the most colorful and fascinating countries in history. These are the islands that Europeans set out on countless voyages of discovery to find and later fought bitterly over in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. This was the land that Christopher Columbus sought, and Magellan reached and explored. One tiny Indonesian island was even exchanged for the island of Manhattan in 1667!

This fascinating history book tells the story of Indonesia as a narrative of kings, traders, missionaries, soldiers and revolutionaries, featuring rough sea crossings, fiery volcanoes, and the occasional tiger. It recounts the colorful visits of foreign travelers who have passed through these shores for many centuries--from Chinese Buddhist pilgrims and Dutch adventurers to English sea captains and American movie stars. For readers who want an entertaining introduction to Asia's most fascinating country, this is delightful reading.

The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam tells the darkly humorous story of the French colonial state's failed efforts to impose its vision of modernity upon the colonial city of Hanoi, Vietnam.

Part of the Graphic Histories series, this book offers a case study in the history of imperialism, highlighting the racialized economic inequalities of empire, colonization as a form of modernization, and industrial capitalism's creation of a radical power differential between the West and the rest. On a deeper level, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt examines the contradictions unique to the French Third Republic's colonial civilizing mission, the development of Vietnamese resistance to French rule, and the history of disease. Featuring forty-nine primary sources--many available in English for the first time--and three full-color maps, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt illustrates the ironic and tragic ways in which modernization projects can have unintended consequences.

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and, on behalf of 68 million compatriots, announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after World War II.

In this vivid history, renowned scholar and celebrated author of Congo David Van Reybrouck captures a period of extraordinary tumult and chaos to tell the story of Indonesia's momentous revolution, known as the Revolusi. Encompassing several hundred years of history, he details the formation of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese invasion that followed, and the young rebels who engaged in armed resistance once the occupation ended. British and Dutch troops were sent to restore order and keep peace, but instead ignited the first modern war of decolonization. America, too, became embroiled with the Indonesians' fierce struggle for freedom. That struggle inspired independence movements in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, especially in the wake of Indonesia's monumental 1955 Bandung Conference, the first global conference without the West. The whole world had become involved in Revolusi, and the whole world was changed by it.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eyewitness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative, written with remarkable historical clarity and filled with tragedy and passion. A landmark history, Revolusi cements Indonesia's struggle for independence as one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and entirely reframes our understanding of post-colonialism.

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa.

The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogot and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

Simon Winchester's long experience in the world wandering as well as his knowledge of history and geology give us an entirely new perspective on this fascinating and iconic event as he brings it telling back to life.

When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Jim Stockdale's early retirement from military life, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor. His writings have been many and varied, but all converge on the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.

In this forensic, unflinching, devastating work of historical recovery (Sathnam Sanghera), Bud Dajo--an American atrocity bigger than Wounded Knee or My Lai, yet today largely forgotten--is revealed, thanks to the rediscovery of a single photograph.

In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called 'Battle of Bud Dajo' was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a brilliant feat of arms according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story. Despite the fact that the slaughter of Moros had been captured on camera, the memory of the massacre soon disappeared from the historical record.

In Massacre in the Clouds, Kim A. Wagner meticulously recovers the history of a forgotten atrocity and the remarkable photograph that exposed its grim logic. His vivid, unsparing account of the massacre--which claimed hundreds more lives than Wounded Knee and My Lai combined--reveals the extent to which practices of colonial warfare and violence, derived from European imperialism, were fully embraced by Americans with catastrophic results.

From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History of the Philippines recasts various Philippine narratives with an eye for the layers of colonial and postcolonial history that have created this diverse and fascinating population.

A History of the Philippines begins with the pre-Westernized Philippines in the 16th century and continues through the 1899 Philippine-American War, the nation's relationship with the United States' controlling presence, culminating with its independence in 1946 and two ongoing insurgencies, one Islamic and one Communist.

Luis H. Francia creates an illuminating portrait that offers the reader valuable insights into the heart and soul of the modern Filipino, laying bare the multicultural, multiracial society of contemporary times.

The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines.

From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr's unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.

Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - The national bestseller that tells the truth about the Vietnam War from the black soldiers' perspective.

An oral history unlike any other, Bloods features twenty black men who tell the story of how members of their race were sent off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, and of the special test of patriotism they faced. Told in voices no reader will soon forget, Bloods is a must-read for anyone who wants to put the Vietnam experience in historical, cultural, and political perspective.

Praise for Bloods

Superb . . . a portrait not just of warfare and warriors but of beleaguered patriotism and pride. The violence recalled in Bloods is chilling. . . . On most of its pages hope prevails. Some of these men have witnessed the very worst that people can inflict on one another. . . . Their experience finally transcends race; their dramatic monologues bear witness to humanity.--Time

Wallace] Terry's oral history captures the very essence of war, at both its best and worst. . . . He] has done a great service for all Americans with Bloods. Future historians will find his case studies extremely useful, and they will be hard pressed to ignore the role of blacks, as too often has been the case in past wars.--The Washington Post Book World

Terry set out to write an oral history of American blacks who fought for their country in Vietnam, but he did better than that. He wrote a compelling portrait of Americans in combat, and used his words so that the reader--black or white--knows the soldiers as men and Americans, their race overshadowed by the larger humanity Terry conveys. . . . This is not light reading, but it is literature with the ring of truth that shows the reader worlds through the eyes of others. You can't ask much more from a book than that.--Associated Press

Bloods is a major contribution to the literature of this war. For the first time a book has detailed the inequities blacks faced at home and on the battlefield. Their war stories involve not only Vietnam, but Harlem, Watts, Washington D.C. and small-town America.--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I wish Bloods were longer, and I hope it makes the start of a comprehensive oral and analytic history of blacks in Vietnam. . . . They see their experiences as Americans, and as blacks who live in, but are sometimes at odds with, America. The results are sometimes stirring, sometimes appalling, but this three-tiered perspective heightens and shadows every tale.--The Village Voice

Terry was in Vietnam from 1967 through 1969. . . . In this book he has backtracked, Studs Terkel-like, and found twenty black veterans of the Vietnam War and let them spill their guts. And they do; oh, how they do. The language is raw, naked, a brick through a window on a still night. At the height of tension a sweet story, a soft story, drops into view. The veterans talk about fighting two wars: Vietnam and racism. They talk about fighting alongside the Ku Klux Klan.--The Boston Globe

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

Written with the style of a great novelist and the intrigue of a Cold War thriller, Embers of War is a landmark work that will forever change your understanding of how and why America went to war in Vietnam. Tapping newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations, Fredrik Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to tragically lose their way in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He brings to life the bloodiest battles of France's final years in Indochina--and shows how, from an early point, a succession of American leaders made disastrous policy choices that put America on its own collision course with history. An epic story of wasted opportunities and deadly miscalculations, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another. Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Embers of War is a gripping, heralded work that illuminates the hidden history of the French and American experiences in Vietnam.

ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED WORKS OF HISTORY IN RECENT YEARS
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians - Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award - Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award - Finalist for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post - The Christian Science Monitor - The Globe and Mail

A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.--Pulitzer Prize citation

This extraordinary work of modern history combines powerful narrative thrust, deep scholarly authority, and quiet interpretive confidence.--Francis Parkman Prize citation

A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date.--The Wall Street Journal

Superb . . . a product of formidable international research.--The Washington Post

Lucid and vivid . . . a] definitive history.--San Francisco Chronicle

An essential work for those seeking to understand the worst foreign-policy adventure in American history . . . Even though readers know how the story ends--as with The Iliad--they will be as riveted by the tale as if they were hearing it for the first time.--The Christian Science Monitor

A brilliant, coherent social and political overview spanning three turbulent centuries.--San Francisco Chronicle

Stanley Karnow won the Pulitzer Prize for this account of America's imperial experience in the Philippines. In a swiftly paced, brilliantly vivid narrative, Karnow focuses on the relationship that has existed between the two nations since the United States acquired the country from Spain in 1898, examining how we have sought to remake the Philippines in our image, an experiment marked from the outset by blundering, ignorance, and mutual misunderstanding.

Stanley Karnow has written the ultimate book--brilliant, panoramic, engrossing--about American behavior overseas in the twentieth century.--The Boston Sunday Globe

A page-turning story and authoritative history.--The New York Times

Perhaps the best journalist writing on Asian affairs.--Newsweek

Since it was first published in 2005, A History of Thailand has been hailed as an authoritative, lively and readable account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. From the early settlements in the Chao Phraya basin to today, Baker and Phongpaichit trace how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed by colonialism, the expansion of the rice frontier and the immigration of traders and labourers from southern China. This book examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation‐state at the end of the nineteenth century, and how urban nationalists, ambitious generals, communist rebels and business politicians competed to take control through the twentieth century. It tracks Thailand's economic changes, globalisation and the evolution of mass society, and draws on popular culture to dramatize social trends. This edition contains a new chapter on Thailand's turbulent politics since 2006 and incorporates new sources and research throughout.

A comprehensive guide to understanding Vietnam's long and tumultuous history

A Brief History of Vietnam explores the turbulent history of a land that has risen from the ashes of war to become the newest Asian tiger economy. This book expertly examines the history of a people and a nation with ancient roots which only took its current shape in the 19th century under French colonial rule, and its current name in 1945.

Before that, Vietnam was known by many names, under many rulers. Located in the geographic center of Southeast Asia, the country we call Vietnam was ruled by China, then by a series of Vietnamese emperors, and by the French. A devastating, decades-long conflict for independence ensued, ending with the conclusion of the Vietnam War in 1975. Key topics discussed in this fascinating book include:

• China's ancient conquest of Vietnam and the millennia-long struggle of the Vietnamese for independence from their powerful neighbor to the north
• The reign of the Nguyen dynasty, the last dynasty to rule Vietnam, with its capital at the ancient city of Hue, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site
• The story of Ho Chi Minh, educated in France, who attended the Treaty of Versailles to advocate for independence and became Vietnam's first president after the French were defeated
• The country's miraculous emergence from three decades of war and how it has embarked on the path to becoming one of the world's fastest-growing economies today

Journalist Bill Hayton's accessible prose makes A Brief History of Vietnam an essential study of a complex culture at the heart of Southeast Asia--and the roots of its current economic dynamism.

The modern states of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, and East Timor were once a tapestry of kingdoms, colonies, and smaller polities linked by sporadic trade and occasional war. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the United States and several European powers had come to control almost the entire region--only to depart dramatically in the decades following World War II.

The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia offers a new and up-to-date perspective on this complex region. Although it does not neglect nation-building (the central theme of its popular and long-lived predecessor, In Search of Southeast Asia), the present work focuses on economic and social history, gender, and ecology. It describes the long-term impact of global forces on the region and traces the spread and interplay of capitalism, nationalism, and socialism. It acknowledges that modernization has produced substantial gains in such areas as life expectancy and education but has also spread dislocation and misery.

Organizationally, the book shifts between thematic chapters that describe social, economic, and cultural change, and country chapters emphasizing developments within specific areas. Enhanced by scores of illustrations, The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia will establish a new standard for the history of this dynamic and radically transformed region of the world.

Contributors: David Chandler, Norman G. Owen, William R. Roff, David Joel Steinberg, Jean Gelman Taylor, Robert H. Taylor, Alexander Woodside, David K. Wyatt.

Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker started covering Cambodia in 1973 for The Washington Post, when the country was perceived as little more than a footnote to the Vietnam War. Then, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 came the closing of the border and a systematic reorganization of Cambodian society. Everyone was sent from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields. The intelligentsia were brutally exterminated, and torture, terror, and death became routine. Ultimately, almost two million people--nearly a quarter of the population--were killed in what was one of this century's worst crimes against humanity.When the War Was Over is Elizabeth Becker's masterful account of the Cambodian nightmare. Encompassing the era of French colonialism and the revival of Cambodian nationalism; 1950s Paris, where Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot received his political education; the killing fields of Cambodia; government chambers in Washington, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh; and the death of Pol Pot in 1998; this is a book of epic vision and staggering power. Merging original historical research with the many voices of those who lived through the times and exclusive interviews with every Cambodian leader of the past quarter century, When the War Was Over illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning.

For over 400 years, Taiwan has suffered at the hands of multiple colonial powers, but it has now entered the decade when its independence will be won or lost. At the heart of Taiwan's story is the curse of geography that placed the island on the strategic cusp between the Far East and Southeast Asia and made it the guardian of some of the world's most lucrative trade routes. It is the story of the dogged determination of a courageous people to overcome every obstacle thrown in their path. Forbidden Nation tells the dramatic story of the island, its people, and what brought them to this moment when their future will be decided.

Discover the fascinating Philippines in this captivating book on its history, from the origins of the archipelago's first peoples until modern times.

The Philippines is possibly the most intriguing nation of maritime Southeast Asia. The archipelago has almost eight thousand islands that form the apex of the Coral Triangle of the Asian Pacific, as well as abundant marine life that constitutes almost half of this magnificent area's oceanic megadiversity. Created from volcanic activity, the archipelago offers everything from extensive beaches to tropical forests and Himalayan-type highlands. Lush valleys and world-renowned rice terraces nestle between the mountains and volcanoes. The Philippines boasts an overwhelming array of biodiversity, both fauna and flora, with many of the species being endemic. The islands have not always been as distant from the mainland, and as sea levels rose and fell during the ice ages, the Philippines became home to successive waves of migrants over the millennia. The Philippines is as old as it is beautiful, and it has produced one of the earliest examples of ancient humankind on Earth and provides a wealth of ancient artifacts from human civilizations, as well as prehistoric creatures.

The Philippines is further gifted with abundant mineral and metal resources, and in the Common Era, powerful Filipino principalities built upon foreign trade that emerged at strategic places on the ancient maritime trade routes. The Filipinos' interactions with the Indianized kingdoms of Java and Sumatra merged with influences from Arabia and the Asian mainland. Trade, piracy, intermarriages, and cultural blending created a diverse and unique archipelagic culture. Once colonial influences arrived in the 16th century, the Philippines was mostly involved with the Sultanate of Brunei from Borneo, China, and Japan. Spanish colonists eventually had control of the Philippines-which they demarcated and named-by the late 1500s and retained suzerainty over the islands for over three hundred years. For the first half of the 20th century, the Americans controlled the Philippines, mostly as a strategic military stronghold. The Americans and Filipinos battled together to throw off Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and finally, in 1946, the Philippines became an independent state. Still heavily influenced by the West because of its history, the Filipino people are mostly Roman Catholic, and English is one of their primary languages. Beauty, history, and cultural diversity ensure this archipelago's tradition as the Pearl of the Orient Seas.

In this book, you will learn:

• That the Philippines is an area of biological and maritime megadiversity.
• Why the islands have one of the oldest, multi-layered histories on Earth.
• Why the Philippines was so attractive to colonizers.
• How the Spanish managed to rule a diverse archipelago for over three centuries.
• To understand the ongoing relationship between the United States and the Philippines.
• Why the islands are ethnically and culturally abundant but still unified.
• How history has created its own island regions of independent rule.

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Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power.

Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.

A fascinating look at the recent history of the beautiful but troubled Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia

A richly detailed study that goes a long way toward explaining the contradictions, corruption and complexity of Cambodia.--Ron Gluckman, Wall Street Journal

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s. Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in the capital city of Phnom Penh, now offers an eye-opening appraisal of modern-day Cambodia in the years following its emergence from bitter conflict and bloody upheaval.

In the early 1990s, Cambodia became the focus of the UN's first great post-Cold War nation-building project, with billions in international aid rolling in to support the fledgling democracy. But since the UN-supervised elections in 1993, the nation has slipped steadily backward into neo-authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen. Behind a mirage of democracy, ordinary people have few rights and corruption infuses virtually every facet of everyday life. In this lively and compelling study, the first of its kind, Strangio explores the present state of Cambodian society under Hun Sen's leadership, painting a vivid portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile the promise of peace and democracy with a violent and tumultuous past.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist describes how Cambodia emerged from the harrowing years when a quarter of its population perished under the Khmer Rouge.

A generation after genocide, Cambodia seemed on the surface to have overcome its history -- the streets of Phnom Penh were paved; skyscrapers dotted the skyline. But under this fa e lies a country still haunted by its years of terror.

Although the international community tried to rebuild Cambodia and introduce democracy in the 1990s, in the country remained in the grip of a venal government. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley learned that almost a half of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era suffered from P.T.S.D. -- and had passed their trauma to the next generation. His extensive close-up reporting in Cambodia's Curse illuminates the country, its people, and the deep historical roots of its modern-day behavior.