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Une campagne au Tonkin (A campaign in Tonkin) is a first-hand account of the military campaign mounted by France in 1883-86 in order to establish a protectorate over Tonkin (northern Vietnam). The author, Charles-Edouard Hocquard (1853-1911), was a military doctor who sailed with a French battalion from Toulon in January 1884. He arrived in the Gulf of Tonkin the following month and immediately proceeded to Hanoi by way of Haiphong. Hocquard's book recounts important engagements in the campaign, including the capture of Bắc Ninh and the bombardment and capture of Hưng Hóa in March-A...

This watercolor by Manuel María Paz (1820-1902) shows four Amerindians in the village of Puracé in Popayán Province (present-day Department of Cauca), in southwest Colombia, an area sandwiched between the western and central cordilleras of the Andes. Puracé is also the name of the local volcano and is a Quechua word meaning "fire mountain." One of the most active volcanoes in Colombia, it is surrounded by other volcanic mountains and the sources of several major rivers. The watercolor is typical of Paz's work, which captured the diversity of the population of New Granada ...

This map of the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean, was made in 1622 by the Dutch cartographer Hessel Gerritsz, who was the official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company and a prominent engraver and publisher. It was not intended as a navigational map, but as a luxurious work for the directors of the company. Regions represented include the Asian coast (named Sina and Tartaria) from Canton to the north of Korea; Insulindia to the east of Borneo; the Philippines, Japan, and the Solomon Islands; the Pacific coast of the Americas from Cape Mendocino in present-day California to the southern tip ...

Presented here is an early translation into Russian of Description d'Ukranie, an influential work first published in French in 1651. The author, Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, was a French engineer who worked in Poland between 1630 and 1647. He built fortifications in Ukraine, most of which was then under Polish control, took part in battles with the Cossacks and Tatars, and in 1639 traveled by boat down the Dnieper River. Beauplan produced two important early maps of Ukraine that were based on his own observations and his own careful astronomical and topographic measurements. The book ...

Robert Burns (1759-96) is best known for his poems and songs that reflect Scotland's cultural heritage. He was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, the first of seven children belonging to William Burnes, a tenant farmer, and his wife Agnes Broun. Burns had little formal education, but he read English literature and absorbed the traditional, largely oral Scots-language folk songs and tales of his rural environment. He began to compose songs in 1774, and published his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786. The work was a critical success, and its poems in both Scots an...