[Yŏng-ho Ch'oe is professor emeritus of history at University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has written extensively on pre-modern and modern Korea history and co-edited"Sources of Korean Tradition" and"Sourcebook of Korean Civilization.]

Although there has been much attention given to the  Japanese-Americans who were detained in the infamous detention centers of Hawaii and throughout the Western United States during World War II, virtually nothing is known about the Korean prisoners-of-war (POWs) in Hawaii in the years 1943-45.  Approximately 2,700 Korean POWs were captured and brought to the Island of Oahu, where they were incarcerated until the end of the war and their repatriation to Korea in December 1945. This is a preliminary report on these Koreans based on limited data I have uncovered in the hope that other interested scholars may more fully document their experience in the future.

Plucked mostly from various Pacific islands toward the end of the war, these...

[Paul Gregory is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Kate Zhou is Professor of Chinese Political Economy and Comparative Politics at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of How the Farmers Changed China (Westview, 1996) and China’s Long March to Freedom, Grassroots Modernization (Transaction, 2009).]

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it. The timing is significant for our story. The peasants took action one month before the “reform” congress of the party was announced. Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages. One farmer...

[Peter Hankoff is an award-winning director/writer/producer whose work has taken him all over the world and all over the cable networks. His programs for Unsolved History (Discovery Channel) have taken him inside Hitler's Bunker and Area 51.]

I don't have a story about where I was or what I was doing on December 7, 1941, but I remember Pearl Harbor"even though I wasn't even born yet.

I heard the stories growing up. My dad remembered. He was in a bowling alley in Forest Hills, New York, when a buddy ran in and yelled “Johnnie get your gun, the Japs just invaded Pearl Harbor.” “Japs” was an acceptable word back then, even if no one knew where Pearl Harbor was. But from that day forward, no one would ever forget.

I have had the honor and privilege of meeting, and thanking, many Pearl Harbor survivors. Most were Navy men or Marines. But the Army and Air Corps were there as well and lost many men. Civilians were also on those casualty lists -- many...

[A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint" (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.]

As India prepares to roll out the red carpet to multinational corporations cashing in on the country's nuclear deals with the US and others, a painful reminder has come about what collaborations of this kind can mean: the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas-leak tragedy on December 3, 2009.

On this day of 1984, Bhopal, capital of the central Indian State of Madhya Pradesh, turned into a "Hiroshima of the chemical industry," as the worst industrial disaster in the world has come to be known. A pesticide plant of Union Carbide located there leaked a highly toxic cloud of 42 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) into the air of a densely populated region. Of the 800,000 people living in the city then, 8,000 to 10,000 died within 72 hours. About 300,000 were injured and as many as 25,...

[Tony Horwitz is the author of “Confederates in the Attic” and “A Voyage Long and Strange.” He is working on a book about John Brown’s raid.]

ONE hundred and fifty years ago today, the most successful terrorist in American history was hanged at the edge of this Shenandoah Valley town. Before climbing atop his coffin for the wagon ride to the gallows, he handed a note to one of his jailers: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

Eighteen months later, Americans went to war against each other, with soldiers marching into battle singing “John Brown’s Body.” More than 600,000 men died before the sin of slavery was purged.

Few if any Americans today would question the justness of John Brown’s cause: the abolition of human bondage. But as the nation prepares to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who calls himself the architect of the 9/11 attacks, it may be worth pondering the parallels...

[Stephanie Guilloud graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in 1999. She was hired that week by history professor and organizer Dan Leahy to organize a conference called Trade, Labor, and the Environment: Analyzing the World Trade Organization. She co-founded the Direct Action Network with other organizers from California, Oregon and Washington.]

For five days in 1999, 80,000 people from Seattle and from all over the country stopped the World Trade Organization from meeting. Despite extreme police and state violence, students, organizers, workers, and community members participated in a public uprising using direct actions, marches, rallies, and mass convergences. Longshoremen shut down every port on the West Coast. Global actions of solidarity happened from India to Italy. Trade ministers, heads of state, and corporate hosts were forced to abandon their agenda and declare the Millenium Ministerial a complete failure. We said we would shut it...