The Tragedy of Korea
The Tragedy of Korea

Author: Frederick Arthur McKenzie

Publisher: Franklin Classics

Published: 2018-10-13

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780342719006

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the emergence of separate regimes, 1945-1947
The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the emergence of separate regimes, 1945-1947

Author: Bruce Cumings

Publisher: Cornell

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13:

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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.

Kim Jong Il's North Korea, 2nd Edition
Kim Jong Il's North Korea, 2nd Edition

Author: Alison Behnke

Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1467703559

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Kim Jong Il, one of the world's most infamous dictators, rose to power in the mid-1990s in the small East Asian country of North Korea. He succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung, as that nation's leader. Kim Il Sung took power in North Korea—also known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK—in 1948, and eventually established a state governed by his own version of Communism. Today Kim Jong Il continues his father’s tactics of building a powerful cult of personality around himself, while crushing criticism and opposition to his rule. These practices by both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il have largely cut off the DPRK from the outside world. The Kim leaders' harsh policies have led to tragedy within the nation, contributing to devastating famine and creating a network of labor camps in which many North Koreans are tortured and killed annually. Kim's secrecy and his strict control of information entering or leaving North Korea have also made the nation a largely mysterious place. In Kim Jong Il's North Korea, learn more about this inscrutable nation and its dictator.

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)
Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

Author: Min Jin Lee

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 1455563919

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A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*

The Korean War and Postmemory Generation
The Korean War and Postmemory Generation

Author: Dong-Yeon Koh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-30

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1000407551

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This pioneering volume navigates cultural memory of the Korean War through the lens of contemporary arts and film in South Korea for the last two decades. Cultural memory of the Korean War has been a subject of persistent controversy in the forging of South Korean postwar national and ideological identity. Applying the theoretical notion of “postmemory,” this book examines the increasingly diversified attitudes toward memories of the Korean War and Cold War from the late 1990s and onward, particularly in the demise of military dictatorships. Chapters consider efforts from younger generation artists and filmmakers to develop new ways of representing traumatic memories by refusing to confine themselves to the tragic experiences of survivors and victims. Extensively illustrated, this is one of the first volumes in English to provide an in-depth analysis of work oriented around such themes from 12 renowned and provocative South Korean artists and filmmakers. This includes documentary photographs, participatory public arts, independent women’s documentary films, and media installations. The Korean War and Postmemory Generation will appeal to students and scholars of film studies, contemporary art, and Korean history.

South Korean Film
South Korean Film

Author: Hyon Joo Yoo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1501322575

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South Korean Film: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential three-volume reference collection representing three distinct phases in the development of South Korean national cinema, foregrounding how epochal characteristics inform the way in which the national cinema represents the penetrating thematic concern of auteur-ship, genre, spectatorship, gender, and nation, as well as the way in which these themes find expression in distinct visual styles and forms.

American Tragedy
American Tragedy

Author: David E. Kaiser

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 9780674006720

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A re-creation of the deliberations, actions, and deceptions that brought two decades of post-World War II confidence to an end, this book offers an insight into the Vietnam War at home and abroad - and into American foreign policy in the 1960s.

The Comfort Women
The Comfort Women

Author: C. Sarah Soh

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 022676804X

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In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

The Quest for Statehood
The Quest for Statehood

Author: Richard S. Kim

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0195369998

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In this book, Richard S. Kim examines the central role played by immigrants in the independence movement that sought to liberate Korea from Japanese colonization. Regarding Japanese rule as illegitimate, Koreans in and out of the Korean peninsula viewed themselves as a stateless people. Their independence activities had to be carried out from abroad, creating conditions for the emergence of a diasporic nationalism. Using English and Korean language sources, Kim traces how Koreans in the United States articulated visions of national sovereignty, drawing particularly on American political rhetoric and symbolism, and increasingly relied on U.S. state power to mobilize international support for their cause. Their efforts to establish an independent homeland necessitated their participation in civic and political activities in the United States, engaging in organizational activity that led to the development of an ethnic consciousness and paradoxically established them as an American ethnic group. Ultimately, Kim argues, homeland nationalism was central to the assimilation of Korean immigrants as American ethnics, even as they were denied U.S. citizenship.

North of the DMZ
North of the DMZ

Author: Andrei Lankov

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0786451416

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The Kim dynasty has ruled North Korea for over 60 years. Most of that period has found the country suffering under mature Stalinism characterized by manipulation, brutality and tight social control. Nevertheless, some citizens of Kim Jong Il's regime manage to transcend his tyranny in their daily existence. This book describes that difficult but f existence and the world that the North Koreans have created for themselves in the face of oppression. Many features of this world are unique and even bizarre. But they have been created by the citizens to reflect their own ideas and values, in sharp contrast to the world forced upon them by a totalitarian system. Opening chapters introduce the political system and the extent to which it permeates citizens' daily lives, from the personal status badges they wear to the nationalized distribution of the food they eat. Chapters discussing the schools, the economic system, and family life dispel the myth of the workers' paradise that North Korea attempts to perpetuate. In these chapters the intricacies of daily life in a totalitarian dictatorship are seen through the eyes of defectors whose anecdotes constitute an important portion of the material. The closing chapter treats at length the significant changes that have taken place in North Korea over the last decade, concluding that these changes will lead to the quiet but inevitable death of North Korean Stalinism. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.