The People of Cambodia

Published in 1997, this children's nonfiction title by Dolly Brittan is described by its own publisher summary as a book that "introduces the history, religion, language and culture of Cambodia." Cataloged under the Dewey classification for Cambodia and shelved as juvenile literature, it belongs to the genre of world-cultures readers that were common in American school and public libraries through the 1990s, giving students a compact overview of a nation's people rather than a specialist history. For Cambodia specifically, a book published in this period sits close to the country's postwar recovery years — well after the end of the Khmer Rouge era in 1979 and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, and around the time of the UN-supervised transition and 1993 elections that restored a constitutional monarchy — making it a snapshot of how Cambodia's culture and people were being introduced to young Western readers as the country was still actively rebuilding.