On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d'�tat and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence, and over the next ten days hundreds of students, activists and citizens were arrested, tortured and murdered. The events of the uprising shaped over a decade of resistance to the repressive South Korean regime, and paved the way for the country's democratisation in the 1990s....

The New York Times bestseller that inspired the documentary Shanghai 1937: Where World War II Began on Public Television.At its height, the Battle of Shanghai involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators—and often victims. It turned what had been a Japanese imperialist adventure in China into a general war between the two oldest and proudest civilizations of the Far East. U...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.Bringing together the military mights of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United Nations States, the Korean War raged for three years from 1950 to 1953. Not only the result of a carving of Korean territories following the Pacific conflicts of the Second World War, it was also a battle of ideologies as General MacArthur’s American military forces occupied the southern half and Stalin’s...

When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it.As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and cr...

Three Canadians – Lewis MacKenzie, Romeo Dallaire and Louise Arbour – were at the centre of the two greatest tragedies of the 1990s. Two of them could have stopped the killing. One was asked to bring the perpetrators to justice. In this riveting, original and explosive book, Carol Off explores the failure of peacekeeping missions in Sarajevo and Rwanda, and the international community’s attempt to redeem itself by prosecuting the people responsible for the genocides. Events turned on the a...

**A “riveting and important” story of heroism and justice: How—and against what odds—the perpetrators of Balkan genocide were captured by the most successful manhunt in history (TIME)“. . . adds greatly to our understanding of how international criminal justice has evolved and offers lessons for future war crimes investigations.” —Newsweek**Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher’s Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balka...

General Sir Mike Jackson's illustrious career in the British Army has spanned almost 45 years and all that time he has shown loyalty, courage and commitment to the British army whilst also being an undeniable media attraction.A man of substance where foreign policy is concerned, he has served in theatres from the Artic to the jungle but is perhaps best known for his role in charge of the British troops to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, for assembling the British ground component o...

Twenty years ago, the term 'ethnic cleansing' entered the common lexicon. The terrible events that took place in the UN 'safe haven' at Bihac in North-west Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 represent the Bosnian conflict in microcosm. Muslim fought all factions of Serb, Muslim fought Muslim, and the Croats interfered. As an EC Monitoring Mission Observer, author Brendan O'Shea was not only an eye witness to the horrific war crimes committed by all sides but also had access to b...

Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an "insane" dictator at its helm, North Korea—charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil"—is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable of delivering them to America's West Coast.But, as Bruce Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than our leaders or our news m...

An acclaimed history of the Korean Peninsula from World War II to the present dayNorth Korea is an impoverished, famine-ridden nation, but it is also a nuclear power whose dictator Kim Jong-un regularly threatens his neighbors and adversaries, the United States in particular, with destruction. Even though Kim and President Donald Trump's responses to him dominate the daily headlines, the idea that North Korea is a menace is not a new one. Indeed, ever since Korea w...

No other narrative from within the corridors of power has offered as frank and intimate an account of the making of the modern Chinese nation as Ji Chaozhu’s The Man on Mao’s Right. Having served Chairman Mao Zedong and the Communist leadership for two decades, and having become a key figure in China’s foreign policy, Ji now provides an honest, detailed account of the personalities and events that shaped today’s People’s Republic.The youngest son of a prosperous government...

A powerful, character-driven narrative of the Korean War from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who helped uncover some of its longest-held and darkest secrets.The war that broke out in Korea on a Sunday morning seventy years ago has come to be recognized as a critical turning point in modern history -- as the first great clash of arms of the Cold War, the last conflict between superpowers, the root of a nuclear crisis that grips the world to this day.In th...