This book of landscape and genre paintings by the 19th-century Korean artist Gisan documents traditional daily life in Korea around 1900. Gisan worked in Korean port cities and as a result his work was disseminated and sold internationally. In fact, the number of his works in North American and European collections far surpasses that found in Korea. Korea Around 1900 includes 27 poster-format paintings from the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum as well as 23 small-format paintings from the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands. The ink-and-colour paintings depict a vanished Korea of pastoral landscapes, traditional customs and costume, and the rhythm of the seasons.

?Clark thoroughly evaluates a wealth of primary sources to provide an extraordinary monograph about Westerners and their arduous experience in Korea?illuminates major historical events of modern Korea as seen through foreign eyes, and narrates Western residents? tacit assistance in the underground Korean nationalist movement. He explains the influence of colonial rule on the Korean people, Western experience in a divided Korea after WWII, and the dynamics for the Korean War?s eruption. With original in-depth analysis, this book offers and unusual addition to the Western literature of Modern Korea. Highly recommended.??Choice ?Living Dangerously in Korea gives a grand, panoramic view of the events of the Korean Peninsula in the first half of the 20th century. Clark has provided many unique insights into Korean history while retracing his family?s missionary life back to the era of his grandfather. This really is an extraordinary book with great depth and a feeling for the importance of many historical events in Korea that impacted the world at large.??Korean Quarterly ??the book?s wealth of anecdotes and vignettes will enrich anyone?s understanding of Korea. Clark?s vast knowledge and familiarity with modern Korea and with the Western community is apparent. We are reading the distillation of a lifetime of study informed by his own upbringing as a 'Korea Kid.? This book should be accessible to most undergraduate students, and should be on the reading list of anyone with an interest in modern Korean history or the story of Westerners and Asia.??Education About Asia

Through new research and materials, Edward T. Chang proves in Pachappa Camp: The First Koreatown in the United States that Dosan Ahn Chang Ho established the first Koreatown in Riverside, California in early 1905. Chang reveals the story of Pachappa Camp and its roots in the diasporic Korean community's independence movement efforts for their homeland during the early 1900s and in the lives of the residents. Long overlooked by historians, Pachappa Camp studies the creation of Pachappa Camp and its place in Korean and Korean American history, placing Korean Americans in Riverside at the forefront of the Korean American community’s history.

Americans think of the Korean War as death and hardship in the bitter hills of Korea. It was certainly this, and for those who fought this is what they generally saw. Yet every foot of the struggles forward, every step of the retreats, the overwhelming victories, the withdrawals and last ditch stands had their seagoing support and overtones. The spectacular ones depended wholly on amphibious power -- the capability of the twentieth century scientific Navy to overwhelm land-bound forces at the point of contact. Yet the all pervading influence of the sea was present even when no major landing or retirement or reinforcement highlighted its effect. When navies clash in gigantic battle or hurl troops ashore under irresistible concentration of ship-borne guns and planes, nations understand that sea power is working. It is not so easy to understand that this tremendous force may effect its will silently, steadily, irresistibly even though no battles occur. No clearer example exists of this truth in wars dark record than in Korea. Communist-controlled North Korea had slight power at sea except for Soviet mines. So beyond this strong underwater phase the United States Navy and allies had little opposition on the water. It is, therefore, easy to fail to recognize the decisive role navies played in this war fought without large naval battles.

The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War by the CIA, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s sophisticated style with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director. A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.