In the southwestern Pacific, strung out along a chain of volcanic islands between the Solomon Islands and Fiji, lies the nation of Vanuatu, home to one of the most culturally

In the green and temperate southwestern corner of Australia, where towering jarrah and karri forests give way to a coastline of white sand and where wildflowers blanket the earth in

In the tremendous gorge of the Nu river, the stream the Chinese call the Angry River, in the far northwest of Yunnan near the borders of Burma and Tibet, live

Upstream of Egypt, between the granite cataracts of the middle Nile, lives a people whose kingdoms once conquered the pharaohs and whose villages now lie partly under a lake bearing

Across the sunlit south of France, from the Atlantic to the Alps and the Mediterranean, live the Occitans, a people defined not by a state but by a language, the

Across the forests, lakes, and rivers of the upper Great Lakes and out toward the northern plains live the Ojibwe, known also as the Chippewa and counted among the Anishinaabe,

From Varanasi and the Ganges to the Taj Mahal and Bollywood, the people of the northern plains form the cultural heartland of India.

A people bound by language rather than blood, spread across two dozen countries. The story of the Arabs, the Arabic tongue, the rise of Islam, a golden age of learning, colonialism, oil, and the struggles of today.

Across the highlands and plains of the southern and central Horn of Africa spreads the largest single nation of the region, a people whose numbers, whose vast land, and whose

In the great forests of the Greater Khingan mountains, in the far northeast of China near the Amur, live the Oroqen, a small people who were, until living memory, hunters