Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The Korean War: A History explores historical memories of the Korean War from the perspectives of the United States, North Korea, and South Korea. As the first full-length study to provide a multidimensional examination of how people in these three nation-states have remembered this pivotal mid- twentieth-century conflict, the book marks a notable contribution to the historiography of the Korean War. Author Bruce Cumings, a foremost expert on the war, brings to the table over three decades of critically minded scholarship on the historical origins and consequences of this oft-underappreciated--and still-un-resolved--war. In doing so, he compellingly argues that an earnest, reflexive reexamination by the American public of what he calls the "forgotten" and "never-known" war is long overdue (p. xv).
Deftly shuttling back and forth across the eight decades that have spanned the start of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45) to the present, Cumings interweaves his analysis of Korean War history and memory from the perspective of the three countries into nine chapters of varied length. Building upon earlier research for his seminal two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; 1990), as well as more recent work on the ideological climate of early cold war America, the author elucidates in pointed fashion the pervasive ignorance of Korean political and social realities among key American actors. He also vividly illustrates their reliance on orientalist perceptions and paranoiac fears of communist expansionism in scripting poorly informed policies and strategies that not only brought devastating consequences upon most Koreans but also resulted in America's first military defeat of the post-1945 era. Failing to understand the complicated factors behind the war, most Americans have instead relied on a simplistic cold war framework to misrecognize it...