Behind a two-hundred-kilometer reef in the central Carolines lies a lagoon that holds a drowned volcano’s peaks, the Pacific war’s largest ghost fleet, and one of Micronesia’s most populous and

Along the sheltered inlets and island channels of the Salish Sea, the Coast Salish peoples have built one of the most enduring maritime cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Their villages

In the rainforests where the eastern foothills of the Andes meet the lowland Amazon, along the border between Ecuador and Colombia, live the Cofan, an indigenous people with a deep

A small forest people from China’s northeast who seized the imperial throne, ruled as the Qing dynasty for nearly three centuries, and then quietly dissolved into the civilization they had conquered.

Midway between Tahiti and Tonga lies the archipelago whose harbors, tradition says, launched the canoes that settled New Zealand. The Cook Islands Maori built chieftaincies whose ariki still sit in

When Egypt’s majority changed languages and faiths, one community simply kept the country’s own name. The Copts, direct heirs of the ancient Egyptians, adopted Christianity in Saint Mark’s Alexandria, invented

At the far southwestern tip of Britain, a rugged peninsula of cliffs, moors, and old mines reaching into the Atlantic, is the homeland of the Cornish, one of the Celtic

In the western Mediterranean, a great mountain rising from the sea, lies the island of Corsica, home to the Corsicans, a proud people whose culture bridges France and Italy. Ruled

Along the blue crescent of the Adriatic and inland to the plains of central Europe live the Croats, a South Slavic people whose identity was forged on a frontier between

High in the central mountains of Western New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of Papua, a wide green valley opens between steep ridges and cloud-wrapped peaks. This is the Baliem