Korea category: 281 books

Korean Culture Series 12 Korean Ceramics Korean pottery may not be ornate, nor is it imposing in size, but it is distinguished by its infinite embrace of nature. Through a continued mutual exchange with China, Korea developed a ceramics style that captured the Korean spirit. The uniqueness...

The Origins of the Choson Dynasty provides an exhaustive analysis of the structure and composition of Korea's central officialdom during the transition from the Koryo dynasty (918-1392) to the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) and offers a new interpretation of the history of traditional Korea.

Appreciate the understated glamour and traditional comfort in this collection of the most excellent examples of timeless Korean architecture. Hanok: The Korean House provides new insights on the stylish traditional Korean homes that are experiencing a resurgence of popularity in Seoul today....

Clark Sorensen presents a description of the economic and ecological organization of rural Korean domestic groups and an analysis of their adaption to the changes brought about by Korea's rapid industrialization. Still one of the only book-length studies of rural, peasant Korean households,...

Never before translated into English, this official history of the reign of King T'aejo--founder of Korea's illustrious Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910 CE)--is a unique resource for reconstructing life in late-fourteenth-century Korea. It includes a wealth of detail not just about politics and war but also religion, astronomy, and the arts.

Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine...

One of the largest political protests in contemporary Korean history, the May 1980 Kwangju Uprising still exerts a profound, often contested, influence in Korean society. Through a deft combination of personal reflections and academic analysis, Contentious Kwangju offers a comprehensive examination...

This collection presents and analyzes inquest records that tell the stories of ordinary Korean people under the Choson court (1392-1910). Extending the study of this period, usually limited to elites, into the realm of everyday life, each inquest record includes a detailed postmortem examination and...

By studying the early splits within Korean nationalism, Michael Robinson shows that the issues faced by Korean nationalists during the Japanese colonial period were complex and enduring. In doing so, Robinson, in this classic text, provides a new context with which to analyze the difficult issues of political identity and national unity that remain central to contemporary Korean politics.

Traditional Korean society was characterized by a rigid hierarchy. The minority Paekjong were the lowest group of the lowest rank of the shinbun class system, and were treated as outcasts throughout the Choson period (1392-1910). This book deals with their historical and social background, and their...

Korean Culture Series 5 Modern Korean Ink Painting This book seeks to define how the term “modern” should be applied to Korean art, while exploring its evolution over roughly a hundred years, from the opening of Korea’s ports to outside trade in 1876 through the 1980s. The purpose...

The Choson state (1392–1910) is typically portrayed as a rigid society because of its hereditary status system, slavery, and Confucian gender norms. However, The Emotions of Justice reveals a surprisingly complex picture of a judicial system that operated in a contradictory fashion by discriminating...

According to conventional interpretations, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 destroyed a budding native capitalist economy on the peninsula and blocked the development of a Korean capitalist class until 1945. In this expansive and provocative study, now available in paperback, Carter J. Eckert...

In April 1885 the British navy seized the small archipelago of Port Hamilton (now Geomundo) off Korea, an incident dubbed the Port Hamilton Affair. This was part of a larger story of Empire and East Asian geopolitics involving China, Japan, Korea and Russia. At the time Britain and Russia seemed close...