Southeast Asia
About the Project In 1950, when the Cornell Southeast Asia Program was established, scholarly publishing on the region was undeveloped. Members of the Program recognized that if students were to be trained, they had to have materials to read, and so the Data Papers series was initiated. In this series, one finds materials to interest linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, political scientists, social scientists, and researchers looking for bibliographic guides to the holdings of Cornell's famous Echols Collection. The various dictionaries included here (the Akha-English Dictionary , Yao-English Dictionary , and the two-volume Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan ) are of great and continuing interest to scholars and speakers of those languages.
Historical Context The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism. The peoples of Southeast Asia experienced waves of colonization beginning in 1511 when the Portuguese took Melaka, a strategic and thriving port city on the Malay Peninsula. The Spanish established a colony in the Philippines which they ruled from the 1560s until 1899 when the United States ousted the Spanish and governed the colony until Philippine independence in 1946. The Dutch gradually conquered the areas known today as Indonesia beginning in 1596 and ending after WWII.