Five-year-old Cathy walked into the shop knowing exactly what kind of shoes she wanted, and asked the salesman: “Do you know everything about shoes?” “Well,” he answered, “almost everything.” At

The Malayali people of Kerala, their Dravidian language, the ancient spice trade, religious coexistence, social reform, the Kerala model, Gulf migration, and a rich performing-arts heritage.

Driven from the plains into the mountains of southwest China, the Miao carried an unwritten history in their embroidery and crowned their festivals in silver.

From Ebla and Palmyra to the Umayyad caliphate and the tragedy of the modern war, the story of one of the world’s oldest and most resilient peoples.

A people of the Caucasus with a language unrelated to any other, an alphabet of their own, an ancient faith, and the oldest winemaking tradition on earth. The story of the Georgians, their golden age, their dark centuries, and their unbreakable culture of hospitality.

A farmer of Nineveh who understood the language of animals would linger each evening in his farmyard, listening to what his beasts said to one another. One night he heard

Sustained for centuries by faith and the sacred memory of a battle lost at Kosovo, the Serbs rose from empire to subjugation to freedom, and their long memory became both their strength and their tragedy.

The Kashmiris of the Himalayan valley, their Dardic language, ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist learning, the ideal of Kashmiriyat, exquisite crafts, and the long tragedy of the Kashmir conflict.

Shaped by the largest land on earth, the Russians are a people of endurance, autocracy and revolution, and a cultural legacy, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the conquest of space, that ranks among humanity greatest.

Speaking a language unlike any of their neighbors, the Hungarians arrived from the distant steppes, built a great kingdom, survived catastrophe after catastrophe, and never stopped being themselves.