ABSTRACT
It is uncertain whether historians of Cambodia a hundred years from now will devote as much space to the country’s brief revolutionary period as to the much longer, more complex, and more mysterious Angkorean era. For nearly all mature Cambodians in the early twenty-first century, however, the three years, eight months, and twenty days that followed the capture of Phnom Penh in April 1975 were a traumatic and unforgettable period. Because of the ferocity with which Cambodia’s revolution was waged, however, and the way it contrasted with many people’s ideas about pre-1970 Cambodia, a chapter-length discussion of the period fits well in a narrative history of this kind.
