Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Korea

"This exceptionally well-written book is good reading, not only for specialists but also for beginning students interested in women, Korean culture, and shamanism." --Journal of Asian Studies

"Kendall maintains a closeness with and respect for her subject that keeps away the chill of academic distance and yet avoids sentimentality." --Korean Quarterly, Spring 2001

Modern Korean breaks new ground in the field of Korean studies by providing students at last with an intermediate-level language text. The volume emphasizes the development of reading proficiency, but the exercises reinforce skills learned through conversation practice. They use a communicative approach emphasizing student-student and student-teacher interactions in real-life scenarios.

Twenty-four lessons are divided into two groups of twelve lessons each. A single lesson consists of a main text, written in expository or descriptive prose that often incorporates a conversational...

The diplomat and scholar-official Min Yong-hwan (1861-1905), described by one contemporary Western observer as undoubtably the first Korean after the emperor, is best remembered in Korean historiography for his pioneering diplomacy at the courts of Tsar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria in the late 1890s. Furthermore, he is considered to be the foremost patriot of Korea's Taehan era (1897-1907). This pioneering study of Min Yong-hwan is long overdue and provides us with a new perspective on a period of Korean history that still casts its shadow over the region today.

This new biography...

In 1903, 102 Koreans migrated to Hawai'i in search of wealth and fortune--the first in their country's history to live in the Western world. Thousands followed. Most of them, however, found only hardship while working as sugar plantation laborers. Soon after their departure, Korea was colonized by Japan, and overnight they became international orphans with no government to protect them. Setting aside their original goal of bettering their own lives, these Korean immigrants redirected their energies to restoring their country's sovereignty, turning Hawai'i into a crucially important base of...

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...

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, North Korea's nuclear program was frozen and Kim Jong Il had signaled he was ready to negotiate. Today, North Korea possesses as many as ten nuclear warheads, and possibly the means to provide nuclear material to rogue states or terrorist groups. How did this happen?

Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with key players in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing, including Colin Powell, John Bolton, and ex-Korean president Kim Dae-jung, as well as insights gained during fourteen trips to Pyongyang, Mike Chinoy takes readers...