Korea

Korea has become familiar to English-speaking audiences through popular culture, food, and its long-running political tensions. Its recorded history, which stretches back about two thousand years, is still unknown to most of them. This book is a general-reader overview of Korean history from antiquity to the present day.

Eugene Y. Park builds his account on sources in the original languages, along with current scholarship in East Asian and Western languages. He gives extra attention to pre-modern Korea, which has had limited coverage in English, and he offers a rigorous analysis of Korea's modernization.

The book also covers subjects that Korea surveys often leave out: daily life, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ history, and the history of North Korea. Park also takes up questions and debates that have been central to Korean studies since the field began, and he moves them forward.