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Television has come to play an ever more decisive role in the preparation and planning of war, as well as in its execution. In War and Television Bruce Cumings carefully explores the history of television's relationship to US warmaking since World War II, up to and including its presentation of the carnage in Kuwait and Iraq. Cumings examines Vietnam, long thought to have been the first television war, but finds that characterization more apt for the Gulf conflict which was fought through, packaged by, and sold to the public on television. At the centre of the book is the extraordinary tale of Cumings's own experience as historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War, and his subsequent trials with the Public Broadcasting System when the film was released for North American distribution.
"Passionate, cantankerous, and fascinating. Rather like Korea itself."--Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Book Review Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed against great powers during the Cold War, and divided and decimated by the Korean War, has recently seen the first real hints of reunification. But positive movements forward are tempered by frustrating steps backward. In the late 1990s South Korea survived its most severe economic crisis since the Korean War, forcing a successful restructuring of its political economy. Suffering through floods, droughts, and a famine that cost the lives of millions of people, North Korea has been labeled part of an "axis of evil" by the George W. Bush administration and has renewed its nuclear threats. On both sides Korea seems poised to continue its fractured existence on into the new century, with potential ramifications for the rest of the world.
"The 'Unknown War' in Korea was very important indeed: as a crucial 'hot' episode in the early Cold War, as a dress rehearsal for Bietnam and as a savage civil war complicated by outside intervention. It left a divided country (35,000 American soldiers and over 3 million Koreans dead), as well as hollow claims of victory from both sides and a legacy of bitterness and controversy. John Halliday and Bruce Cumings have assembled hundreds of photographs to provide a grim picture of everyday life in Korea under 'the heaviest and most sustained bombing ever known'. THey have also talked to a wide range of journalists, observers and participants in many countries, lifted the lid of the 'opaque Never-never-land' of North Korea and cut through the dense propaganda on both sides. The result is a full and unpartisan account of an extraordinary conflict"--Back cover
Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.
A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post–W...
Collection of essays by Cumings on the complex problems of political economy and ideology, power and culture in East and Northeast Asia, providing an understanding of the United States's role in these regions and the consequences for subsequent policy mak
One of the first philosophical approaches to the study of Korea’s ethnic nationalism, Christianity, the Sovereign Subject, and Ethnic Nationalism in Colonial Korea traces the impact of Christianity in the formation of Korean national identity, outlining the metaphysical origins of the concept of the sovereign subject. This monograph takes a meta-historical approach and engages the moral questions of Korean historiography amid the fraught politics of narrating colonialism and the postcolonial period. Indebted to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction and his framework of "hauntology," this monograph unpacks the ethical consequences of ethnic nationalism, exploring how Western meta...