Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Korea

The selections range from the mid- and late Choson dynasty in the sixteenth century, through...

In this unique and informative new volume, Beate Hamizrachi offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of the Israeli-controlled Security Belt and the rise of Lebanese Major Saad Haddad in South Lebanon. The detailed descriptions of events and people, often based on the author's personal experience, in the Lebanese kaleidoscope will give scholars, students, decision-makers, and journalists a better understanding of the ongoing internal struggle and the external pressures in Lebanon.

Hunter provides a glimpse inside North Korean society, detailing the everyday life of people living in perhaps the most isolated, secretive society of the 20th century. In this declassified CIA study, she describes the world's most extreme cult society under the charismatic totalitarian leader, Kim Il-song, who ruled his people for 45 years--longer than any other leader of the 20th century.

Kim Il-song's totalitarian cult society comes closest to George Orwell's 1984 than any society yet contrived. Hunter brings to life what it is like to live in a thoroughly...

As perennial famine and material shortages call into question the tenability of North Korea's military-authoritarian government, the international community has struggled to reconcile contradictory humanitarian, economic, and political goals in formulating foreign policy and aid responses to the secretive Pyongyang regime. In a historical analysis drawing heavily on primary sources, Lee attacks the problem at its root: the assumption of policy-makers that Pyongyang's belligerence and intractability is an attempt to secure autonomy and national legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Rather,...

This collection, edited by Distinguished Professor of Korean Studies Bonnie B. C. Oh, helps to fill a considerable gap in the English-language literature on Korea and the United States. Although much has been written about Korea in the Japanese colonial and World War II period and, of course, even more has been made available on the Korean War years, little has been written on the interim period when the United States attempted to rule Korea through a trusteeship.

Focused on the occupation and reconstruction of Japan after World War II, the U.S. government conceived a trusteeship for...

Following its liberation from Japanese colonialism, at the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two separate nations. Because the Korean nation enjoyed a long dynastic history, its postwar partition was particularly traumatic. The ensuing Cold War years spawned the Korean War and subsequent decades of strained inter-Korean relations and tensions in the region surrounding the peninsula. This volume provides readers who are unfamiliar with Korea's heritage insight into how Korea became a divided nation engulfed in international geopolitical tensions, providing expert analysis of this rendered...

The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually postcolonial revolutionary movements. Gi-Wook Shin examines how peasants responded to these events, and to their own economic and political circumstances, with protests that shaped the course of postwar revolution in the north and reform in the south. Utilizing interviews, documentary research, and statistical analysis, Shin analyzes variation in...

Scholars have long held that Korea's Choson dynasty (1392-1910) was established by a new socioeconomic class of scholar-officials of local-landlord origins who overthrew the capital-based aristocracy of the Koryo dynasty (918-1392). The Origins of the Choson Dynasty refutes that view, showing that a key feature of the dynastic transition was continuity in the structure and composition of the central ruling class and arguing that the main force behind the establishment of the Choson was the need to revamp institutions to protect aristocratic interests. The change of dynasties thus...

The eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula will send political and economic reverberations throughout Northeast Asia and will catalyze the struggle over a new regional order among the four great powers of the Pacific--Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. Korea's Future and the Great Powers addresses the vital issues of how to achieve a stable political order in a unified Korea, how to finance Korean economic reconstruction, and how to link Korea into a cooperative framework of international diplomatic relations.

The rise of South Korea is one of the most unexpected and inspirational developments of the latter part of our century. A few decades ago, the Koreans were an impoverished, agricultural people. In one generation they came out of the fields and into Silicon Valley. In 1997, this powerhouse of a nation reeled and almost collapsed as a result of a weak financial system and heavily indebted conglomerates. The world is now watching to see whether the Koreans will be able to reform and continue their stunning growth.

Although Korea has only recently found itself a part of the global stage,...