"The Backlands" is a translation of Euclide da Cunha's work "Os Sertoes", a non-fictional account of the War of Canudos in Brazil during the 1890s. The deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict was between the Brazilian government and a rebellious village of 30,000 Canudos living in the[...]

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century's imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material - rubber - with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon, a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with[...]