Download or read book A History of Korea written by Michael J. Seth and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2010-10-16 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive yet compact book, Michael J. Seth surveys Korean history from Neolithic times to the present. He explores the origins and development of Korean society, politics, and still little-known cultural heritage, showing how this ancient, culturally and ethnically homogeneous society was wrenched into the modern world, ultimately to be arbitrarily divided into two opposed halves after World War II. Tracing the six decades since, Seth explains how the two Koreas, with their deeply different political and social systems and geopolitical orientations, evolved into sharply contrasting societies. Throughout, he adds a rich dimension by placing Korean history into broader global perspective and by including primary readings from each era. All readers looking for a balanced, knowledgeable history will be richly rewarded with this clear and concise book.

Download or read book A New History of Korea written by Ki-baik Lee and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988-03-15 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language history of Korea to appear in more than a decade, this translation offers Western readers a distillation of the latest and best scholarship on Korean history and culture from the earliest times to the student revolution of 1960. The most widely read and respected general history, A New History of Korea (Han’guksa sillon) was first published in 1961 and has undergone two major revisions and updatings. Translated twice into Japanese and currently being translated into Chinese as well, Ki-baik Lee’s work presents a new periodization of his country’s history, based on a fresh analysis of the changing composition of the leadership elite. The book is noteworthy, too, for its full and integrated discussion of major currents in Korea’s cultural history. The translation, three years in preparation, has been done by specialists in the field.

Download or read book Korea s Place in the Sun A Modern History Updated Edition written by Bruce Cumings and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Korea's Place in the Sun first appeared, Bruce Cumings argued that Korea had endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century." The new century has seen South Korea flourish after a restructuring of its political economy, and North Korea suffer through a famine that has cost the lives of millions of people. The United States continues to play an important role on the Korean peninsula, from the Clinton administration overseeing the first real hints of reunification to the Bush administration confronting a renewal of nuclear threats. On both sides Korea seems poised to continue its fractured existence on into the new century, with potential ramifications for the rest of the world." "For those who need a grounding in the tempestuous history surrounding Korea, or a context in which to understand its role in current global politics, this updated edition of Korea's Place in the Sun is a must read."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Revisiting Minjung written by Sunyoung Park and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epoch-marking alliance of laborers, students, dissident intellectuals, and ordinary citizens was at the heart of South Korea’s transformation from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy during the 1980s. Collectively known as the minjung (“the people”), these agents of Korean democratization historically carved out an expanded role for civil society in the country’s politics. In Revisiting Minjung, some of the foremost experts in 1980s Korean history, literature, film, art, and music provide new insights into one of the most crucial decades in South Korean history. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, post-Marxist studies, intersectional feminism, popular culture studies, and more, the volume demonstrates how an era that is often associated with radical politics was, in effect, the catalyst for the subsequent flourishing of democratic and liberal values in South Korea. Revisiting Minjung brings new themes, new subjectivities, and new theoretical perspectives to the study of the rich ecosystem of 1980s Korean culture. Treated here is a wide array of topics, including the origins of minjung ideology, its critique by the right wing, minjung art and music, workers’ literary culture, women writers and the resurgence of feminism, erotic cinema, science fiction, transnational political travels, and the representations of race and queerness in 1980s popular culture. The book thus details the origins and development of some of the movements that shape cultural life in South Korea today, and it does so through analyses that engage some of the most pressing debates in current scholarship in Korea and abroad.

Download or read book Introduction to Korean History and Culture written by Andrew C. Nahm and published by Hollym International. This book was released on 1993 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book South Korean Social Movements written by Gi-Wook Shin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the evolution of social movements in South Korea by focusing on how they have become institutionalized and diffused in the democratic period. The contributors explore the transformation of Korean social movements from the democracy campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s to the rise of civil society struggles after 1987. South Korea was ruled by successive authoritarian regimes from 1948 to 1987 when the government decided to re-establish direct presidential elections. The book contends that the transition to a democratic government was motivated, in part, by the pressure from social movement groups that fought the state to bring about such democracy. After the transition, however, the movement groups found themselves in a qualitatively different political context which in turn galvanized the evolution of the social movement sector. Including an impressive array of case studies ranging from the women's movement, to environmental NGOs, and from cultural production to law, the contributors to this book enrich our understanding of the democratization process in Korea, and show that the social movement sector remains an important player in Korean politics today. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies, Asian politics, political history and social movements.

Download or read book North Korea written by Heonik Kwon and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.

Download or read book Reconstructing Ancient Korean History written by Stella Xu and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the contested re-readings of “Korea” in early Chinese historical records and their influence on the formation of Korean-ness in later periods. The earliest written records on “Koreans” are found in Chinese documents produced during the Han dynasty, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. Since then, these early Chinese records have been used as primary sources for writing early Korean history in Korea, China, and Japan. This study analyzes the various reinterpretations and utilizations of these early records that became more diverse by the late nineteenth century, when the reconstruction of ancient history became a crucial part of the formation of Korean national consciousness. Korea’s modern historiography was complicated by a thirty-five year colonial experience (1910–1945) under Japan. During this period, Japanese colonial scholars attempted to depict Korean history as stagnant, heteronymous, and replete with factional strife, while Korean nationalist historians strove to construct an indigenous Korean nation in order to mobilize Koreans’ national consciousness and recover political sovereignty. While focused on Korea and Northeast Asia, the links between historiography and political ideology investigated in this study are pertinent to historians in general.

Download or read book The Korean War written by Bruce Cumings and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post–World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides. Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.

Download or read book Korea written by Eugene Y. Park and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive account of Korean history from early times to December 2020.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Modern Korea written by Wanne J. Joe and published by Weatherhill. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding modern Korean culture requires more than just a cursory glance. For a country steeped in such a long history, it is important to go back and look carefully at older times to reach a complete picture of the modern cultural paradigm. Wanne J. Joe has done just that in this extensive book that details how Korean culture grew and flourished from the Joseon Dynasty through to the March 1 Independence Movement in 1919.

Download or read book Korea s Twentieth Century Odyssey written by Michael E. Robinson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910. Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included—and thus implicated—Koreans within the colonial system. He concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula.

Download or read book The Northern Region of Korea written by Sun Joo Kim and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized the northern region and its distinct subjectivities. Contributors to this book address the problem of amnesia regarding this distinct subjectivity of the northern region of Korea in contemporary, historical, and cultural discourses, which have largely been dominated by grand paradigms, such as modernization theory, the positivist perspective, and Marxism. Through the use of storytelling, linguistic analysis, and journal entries from turn-of-the-century missionaries and traveling Russians in addition to many varieties of unconventional primary sources, the authors creatively explore unfamiliar terrain while examining the culture, identity, and regional distinctiveness of the northern region and its people. They investigate how the northern part of the Korean peninsula developed and changed historically from the early Choson to the colonial period and come to a consensus regarding the importance of regionalism as a vital factor in historical transformation, especially in regard to Korea's tumultuous modern era.

Download or read book To Save the Children of Korea written by Arissa H Oh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The important . . . largely unknown story of American adoption of Korean children since the Korean War . . . with remarkably extensive research and great verve.” —Charles K. Armstrong, Columbia University Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, To Save the Children of Korea shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial US-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies, and nationalisms. Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born. “Absolutely fascinating.” —Giulia Miller, Times Higher Education “ Gracefully written. . . . Oh shows us how domestic politics and desires are intertwined with geopolitical relationships and aims.” —Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University “Poignant, wide-ranging analysis and research.” —Kevin Y. Kim, Canadian Journal of History “Illuminates how the spheres of ‘public’ and ‘private,’ ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ are deeply imbricated and complicate American ideologies about family, nation, and race.” —Kira A. Donnell, Adoption & Culture

Download or read book A History of Korea written by Jinwung Kim and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary North and South Korea are nations of radical contrasts: one a bellicose totalitarian state with a failing economy; the other a peaceful democracy with a strong economy. Yet their people share a common history that extends back more than 3,000 years. In this comprehensive new history of Korea from the prehistoric era to the present day, Jinwung Kim recounts the rich and fascinating story of the political, social, cultural, economic, and diplomatic developments in Korea's long march to the present. He provides a detailed account of the origins of the Korean people and language and the founding of the first walled-town states, along with the advanced civilization that existed in the ancient land of "Unified Silla." Clarifying the often complex history of the Three Kingdoms Period, Kim chronicles the five-century long history of the Choson dynasty, which left a deep impression on Korean culture. From the beginning, China has loomed large in the history of Korea, from the earliest times when the tribes that would eventually make up the Korean nation roamed the vast plains of Manchuria and against whom Korea would soon define itself. Japan, too, has played an important role in Korean history, particularly in the 20th century; Kim tells this story as well, including the conflicts that led to the current divided state. The first detailed overview of Korean history in nearly a quarter century, this volume will enlighten a new generation of students eager to understand this contested region of Asia.

Download or read book The Origins of the Korean War Liberation and the emergence of separate regimes 1945 1947 written by Bruce Cumings and published by Cornell. This book was released on 2002 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distributed for Yuksabipyungsa Press Bruce Cumings maintains in his classic account that the origin of the Korean War must be sought in the five-year period preceding the war, when Korea was dominated by widespread demands for political, economic, and social change. Making extensive use of Korean-language materials from North and South, and of classified documents, intelligence reports, and U.S. military sources, the author examines the background of postwar Korean politics and the arrival of American and Soviet troops in 1945. Cumings then analyzes Korean politics and American policies in Seoul as well as in the hinterlands. Arguing that the Korean War was civil and revolutionary in character, Cumings shows how the basic issues over which the war was fought were apparent immediately after Korea's liberation from colonial rule in 1945. These issues led to o the effective emergence of separate northern and southern regimes within a year, extensive political violence in the southern provinces, and preemptive American policies designed to create a bulwark against revolution in the South and Communism in the North.

Download or read book The Korean War in World History written by William Stueck and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2010-09-12 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " The Korean War in World History features the accomplishments of noted scholars over the last decade and lays the groundwork for the next generation of scholarship. These essays present the latest thinking on the Korean War, focusing on the relationship of one country to the war. William Stueck’s introduction and conclusion link each essay to the rich historiography of the event and suggest the war’s place within the history of the twentieth century. The Korean War had two very different faces. On one level the conflict was local, growing out of the internal conditions of Korea and fought almost entirely within the confines of a small Asian country located far from Europe. The fighting pitted Korean against Korean in a struggle to determine the balance of political power within the country. Yet the war had a huge impact on the international politics of the Cold War. Combat threatened to extend well beyond the peninsula, potentially igniting another global conflagration and leaving in its wake a much escalated arms race between the Western and Eastern blocs. The dynamics of that division remain today, threatening international peace and security in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Lloyd Gardner, Chen Jian, Allan R. Millett, Michael Schaller, and Kathryn Weathersby