Korea: A History

From the publisher’s website:

The first English-language history of Korea that offers a balanced, comprehensive overview reflecting recent East Asian and Western scholarship

While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking world, those who follow K-Pop or North Korea’s nuclear weapons program have little familiarity with the region’s recorded history of some two millennia. And for most, “East Asia” still means China and Japan, with South Korea lost somewhere in the middle. 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 most up-to-date synthesis of recent East Asian and Western-language scholarship to provide a history unlike anything currently available. This book expands still-limited English-language discussions on premodern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of Korea’s modernization while discussing LGBT, ethnic minority, and various historical groups not frequently included in Korean histories. 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.

Eugene Y. Park is the Rick and Cathy Trachok Endowed Chair in International Studies and Professor in History at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of A Genealogy of Dissent (Stanford University Press, 2018).