Southeast Asian History

In 1971, while US ground forces were prohibited from crossing the Laotian border, a South Vietnamese Army corps, with US air support, launched the largest airmobile operation in the history of warfare, Lam Son 719. The objective: to sever the North Vietnamese Army's main logistical artery, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at its hub, Tchepone in Laos, an operation that, according to General Creighton Abrams, could have been the decisive battle of the war. Hastening the withdrawal of US forces and ensuring the survival of South Vietnam.

French Indochina: The History and Legacy of the French Empire’s Colonialism in Southeast Asia analyzes the colonization of Southeast Asia and what happened as a result of the decolonization. You will learn about the French in Southeast Asia like never before.

They were young, they were Australian, they were Army engineers and they were the first allied soldiers to risk their lives in the darkness of the Vietcong tunnels of South Vietnam. Staring death squarely in the face every day, not only did they follow their enemy down into these unknown underground labyrinths, but matched the Vietcong’s jungle warfare skills and defused thousands of their clever booby traps. Off duty, it was a different story....

A story of a young woman left behind and a young reporter coming of age in a world of war; a gripping memoir of Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970s. As brutal wars in Cambodia and Vietnam come to swift and cataclysmic ends, a young reporter plans a last minute rescue of a woman he loved. The rescue fails.

Pol Pot was a Cambodian political leader and revolutionary who worked as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 till 1979. He was a key member of Cambodia's communist party, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997, and acted as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. He was a Marxist-Leninist and a Khmer nationalist. Cambodia was changed into a one-party communist state under his management, and the Cambodian genocide happened.

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.

December 8, 1941, marked the start of the full-scale invasion of the Philippines. With the surrender of the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island, Corregidor, in the spring of 1942, all hope seemed lost. But, almost overnight, the Philippine underground resistance began to take shape. Units made up of guerrilla volunteers from all walks of life participated in the liberation of the Philippines.

Dissects the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, the refugee problem, the Vietnam/Cambodia conflict, and the Pol Pot regime.

During the Khmer Rouge's four-year rule of terror, two million people, or one in every four, Cambodians, died. In describing one family's decades-long quest to learn their husband's and father's fate and the war crimes trial of Comrade Duch (pronounced 'Doyk'), who ran the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, When the Clouds Fell from the Sky illuminates the tragedy of a nation.

Making Moros offers a unique look at the colonization of Muslim subjects during the early years of American rule in the southern Philippines. Hawkins argues that the ethnological discovery, organization, and subsequent colonial engineering of Moros was highly contingent on developing notions of time, history, and evolution, which ultimately superseded simplistic notions about race. He also argues that this process was highly collaborative, with Moros participating, informing, guiding, and even investing in their configuration as modern subjects.

The people of the Philippine Islands during the early half of the 20th century experienced various waves of Western imperialism, two wars of attempted secession from Western powers, and two world wars. And yet the Philippine Islands and its people have received only small subheadings in many American textbooks and histories.

Love and Loss in Cambodia is a memoir by Debra Groves Harman. As a teenager, she carried a heavy burden of grief and responsibility. First, her closest person died. Next, her father was critically injured in a traumatic car accident. Perhaps that explains why she's willing to leave the US and go to parts unknown--ending up in Cambodia, or more likely, she's following a traveling man she married in 1993. Memories are drawn from the '90s when the author lived in Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh. That decade was considered dangerous, with Khmer Rouge active on Route 4. When she first arrived in ...

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region's complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region's geopolitics. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together.

This is a short, narrative history of the origins, course, and outcome of America's military involvement in Vietnam by an experienced guide to the causes and conduct of war, Larry H. Addington. He begins with a history of Vietnam before and after French occupation, the Cold War origins of American involvement, the domestic impact of American policies on public support, and the reasons for the ultimate failure of US policy.

In 1973 US participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans.

Kan een stad in je DNA zitten, ook al heeft je wieg er niet gestaan? In Moederstad gaat Philip Dröge in het moderne Jakarta op zoek naar sporen van het oude Batavia. Meer dan drie eeuwen lang woonden zijn voorouders in de stad, zo heeft hij ooit van zijn Indische grootvader gehoord. Wie waren ze? In wat voor stad leefden ze? Hoe is Aziatisch DNA in zijn genoom terechtgekomen? Aan de hand van zijn eigen familiegeschiedenis laat Dröge haarfijn zien hoe dit epicentrum van de kolonie functioneerde.

Thought-provoking and eye-opening, Blood and Silk is an accessible, personal look at modern Southeast Asia, written by one of the region's most experienced outside observers. This is a first-hand account of what it's like to sit at the table with deadly Thai Muslim insurgents, mediate between warring clans in the Southern Philippines and console the victims of political violence in Indonesia - all in an effort to negotiate peace and understand the reasons behind endemic violence.

Delving into the last gasps of the First Indochina War, which saw the communist Viet Minh take control of North Vietnam, Éric Vuillard vividly illustrates the attitudes that both enabled French colonialist abuses and ultimately led to their defeat and withdrawal. From the Michelin rubber plantation, where horrific working conditions sparked an epidemic of suicides, to the battlefield, a sense of superiority over the "yellow men" pervaded European and American forces.