![]() ![]() ![]() Even those who survived had their lives shattered, their property destroyed, and their opportunities narrowed. The waves of retaliation and counter retaliation carried out by leftist and rightist partisans in many areas rent the fabric of Korean society so badly that it took decades to recover. Millions perished and violence was endemic. Missing from these elite-driven histories is a sense of the war’s traumatizing impact on those who felt it most viscerally: the Korean people.įor three years, the Korean War turned the entire Korean peninsula into a ghastly war zone. While the new international history of the war that developed in the 1990s expanded on this perspective by incorporating the communist world, much of it was still focused on political elites – Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and the like. strategic thinking or the combat experience of American forces. ![]() When bookstores and public libraries have any books on the Korean war at all, they tend to be military histories that are written from the American perspective. Much of the literature about the war in the United States focuses on the experiences of a relatively predictable set of actors: political and military leaders and U.S. The Korean War was experienced in different ways by different people. Everett Collection / Shutterstock Open Question: The Lived Experience of North Koreans in the War North Korean delegates to the Communist World Youth Festival parade in East Berlin on August 8, 1951. Researchers have never stopped exploring the conflict, and the opening of new archives in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are helping them do it.įor our Summer 2020 issue, “Korea: 70 Years On,” we asked four distinguished historians to address what they see as the most important open questions about the war and its legacy. What don’t we know? The Korean War is no exception. ![]()
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