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While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension
have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking
world, its recorded history of some two millennia remains
unfamiliar to most. Korea: A History addresses general readers,
providing an up-to-date, accessible overview of Korean history from
antiquity to the present. Eugene Y. Park draws on original-language
sources and the up-to-date synthesis of East Asian and
Western-language scholarship to provide an insightful account. This
book expands still-limited English-language discussions on
pre-modern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of
Korea's modernization while discussing daily life, ethnic
minorities, LGBTQ history, and North Korean history not always
included in Korea surveys. Overall, Park is able to break new
ground on questions and debates that have been central to the field
of Korean studies since its inception.
On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggŭn assassinated
the Japanese statesman Itō Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a
century later, the ramifications of An’s daring act continue to
reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the
abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most
notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p’yŏnghwaron), from a
variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary,
philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been
understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations,
and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of
significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical
underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the
ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is
ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation
in today’s East Asia as a regional collective. Students and
scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from
in this volume.
On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggun assassinated
the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a
century later, the ramifications of An's daring act continue to
reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the
abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most
notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p'yonghwaron), from a
variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary,
philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been
understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations,
and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of
significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical
underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the
ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is
ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation
in today's East Asia as a regional collective. Students and
scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from
in this volume.
While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension
have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking
world, its recorded history of some two millennia remains
unfamiliar to most. Korea: A History addresses general readers,
providing an up-to-date, accessible overview of Korean history from
antiquity to the present. Eugene Y. Park draws on original-language
sources and the up-to-date synthesis of East Asian and
Western-language scholarship to provide an insightful account. This
book expands still-limited English-language discussions on
pre-modern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of
Korea's modernization while discussing daily life, ethnic
minorities, LGBTQ history, and North Korean history not always
included in Korea surveys. Overall, Park is able to break new
ground on questions and debates that have been central to the field
of Korean studies since its inception.
In early modern Korea, the Chosŏn state conducted an extermination
campaign against the Kaesŏng Wang, descendants of the preceding
Koryŏ dynasty. It was so thorough that most of today's descendants
are related to a single survivor. Before long, however, the Chosŏn
dynasty sought to bolster its legitimacy as the successor of Koryŏ
by rehabilitating the surviving Wangs—granting them patronage for
performing ancestral rites and even allowing them to attain
prestigious offices. As a result, Koryŏ descendants came to
constitute elite lineages throughout Korea. As members of the
revived aristocratic descent group, they were committed to
Confucian norms of loyalty to their ruler. The Chosŏn, in turn,
increasingly honored Koryŏ legacies. As the state began to
tolerate critical historical narratives, the early plight of the
Wangs inspired popular accounts that engendered sympathy. Modern
forces of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, urbanization,
industrialization, and immigration transformed the Kaesŏng Wang
from the progeny of fallen royals to individuals from all walks of
life. Eugene Y. Park draws on primary and secondary sources,
interviews, and site visits to tell their extraordinary story. In
so doing, he traces Korea's changing politics, society, and culture
for more than half a millennium.
Koreans are known for their keen interest in genealogy and
inherited ancestral status. Yet today's ordinary Korean would be
hard pressed to explain the whereabouts of ancestors before the
twentieth century. With "A Family of No Prominence," Eugene Y. Park
gives us a remarkable account of a nonelite family, that of Pak
Tokhwa and his descendants (which includes the author). Spanning
the early modern and modern eras over three centuries (1590-1945),
this narrative of one family of the "chungin" class of people is a
landmark achievement.
What we do know of the "chungin," or "middle people," of Korea
largely comes from profiles of wealthy, influential men, frequently
cited as collaborators with Japanese imperialists, who went on to
constitute the post-1945 South Korean elite. This book highlights
many rank-and-file "chungin" who, despite being better educated
than most Koreans, struggled to survive. We follow Pak Tokhwa's
descendants as they make inroads into politics, business, and
culture. Yet many members' refusal to link their family histories
and surnames to royal forebears, as most other Koreans did, sets
them apart, and facilitates for readers a meaningful discussion of
identity, modernity, colonialism, memory, and historical agency.
From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, millions of
Korean men from all walks of life trained in the arts of war to
prepare not for actual combat but to sit for the state military
examination ("mukwa"). Despite this widespread interest, only for a
small minority did passing the test lead to appointment as a
military official. Why, then, did so many men aspire to the
"mukwa"? Eugene Y. Park argues that the "mukwa" was not only the
state's primary instrument for recruiting aristocrats as new
members to the military bureaucracy but also a means by which the
ruling elite of Seoul could partially satisfy the status
aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status
groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves. Unlike the civil
examination ("munkwa"), however, that assured successful examinees
posts in the prestigious central bureaucracy, achievement in the
"mukwa" did not enable them to gain political power or membership
in the existing aristocracy. A wealth of empirical data and primary
sources drives Park's study: a database of more than 32,000
military examination graduates; a range of new and underutilized
documents such as court records, household registers, local
gazetteers, private memoirs, examination rosters, and genealogies;
and products of popular culture, such as "p'ansori" storytelling
and vernacular fiction. Drawing on this extensive evidence, Park
provides a comprehensive sociopolitical history of the "mukwa"
system in late Chosŏn Korea.
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