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...

From a seasoned advisor, "a meaty, fast-paced portrait of North Korean society, economy, politics and foreign policy" ( Foreign Affairs).In The Impossible State, international-policy expert and former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on this controversial and isolated country, providing the best look yet at North Korea's history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive pers...

In 1993, Canadian peacekeepers in Croatia were plunged into the most significant fighting Canada had seen since the Korean War. Their extraordinary heroism was covered up and forgotten. The ghosts of that battlefield have haunted them ever since.Canadian peacekeepers in Medak Pocket, Croatia, found no peace to keep in September 1993. They engaged the forces of ethnic cleansing in a deadly firefight and drove them from the area under United Nations protection. The soldiers should ha...

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...

“Powerful… definitive… Rohde tells the Srebrenica story with all the shades of gray the truth demanded.” —The Washington PostIn 1996, at the height of the Bosnian wars, a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor named David Rohde uncovered a horrifying story that became an enduring symbol of the genocidal nature of that conflict, earning him his first Pulitzer Prize. Endgame is the full-length narrative of the nightmare he stumbled...

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...