A retrospective look at the Korean War and the years of prosperity that followed.

Historical commemorative book honoring U.S. military veterans for their service in the Korean War. (Kia Edition)

My name is Orphan. My father planted the seed of love in my Korean mother but regretted it. When I turned four, she handed me to an orphanage that sent children to America, with my photo, birth certificate, and her note: "Son, your father was a great man doing great things for Koreans, but I can't keep you. Please forgive me..."Returned and Reborn: A Tale of a Korean Orphan Boy is a man's journey of self-discovery; from a nameless boy whose American adoptive parents used him and other "adopted" boys as free laborers, to a man of purpose and goals after returning to his birth nation. He reunites with his mom--a former student of the college his priest father had founded and served as dean--who is now dying from toxic chemicals the U.S. Military disposed of in the Korean waterways. Following a tragic accident, he accepts a divine invitation.

Cultures of Yusin examines the turbulent and yet deeply formative years of Park Chung Hee’s rule in South Korea, focusing on the so-called Yusin era (1972–79). Beginning with the constitutional change that granted dictatorial powers to the president and ending with his assassination, Yusin was a period of extreme political repression coupled with widespread mobilization of the citizenry towards the statist gospel of modernization and development. While much has been written about the political and economic contours of this period, the rich complexity of its cultural production remains obscure. This edited volume brings together a wide range of scholars to explore literature, film, television, performance, music, and architecture, as well as practices of urban and financial planning, consumption, and homeownership. Examining the plural forms of culture’s relationship to state power, the authors illuminate the decade of the 1970s in South Korea and offer an essential framework for understanding contemporary Korean society.

This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization.