San Antonio College Library

This book is part of the Reference Shelf series of books produced by H.W. Wilson Company, which publishes six Reference Shelf books a year on important topics (the sixth book being a compilation of important speeches of the year). Each of these books contains some twenty articles which are drawn from various press and print publications. This book, from the 2004 series, discusses Korea, with 27 articles organized into five sections: history and leadership,...

"Judging from media reports, North Korea is the country Americans love to hate. A charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil" whose leader, Kim Jong Il, is routinely described as "insane" and "diabolical" and a self-proclaimed alternative to neo-liberalism and globalization, North Korea is anathema to conservative and liberal Americans alike. And now the CIA says it possesses one or two nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction,...

While the Cold War is over in the rest of the world, a potentially deadly confrontation continues on the bitterly divided peninsula of Korea, where two of the world's largest armies - along with 37,000 U.S. troops - face each other across the misnamed "demilitarized zone," ready to resume fighting on a moment's notice. Here the United States would be instantly involved in any new outbreak of violence. Below the dividing line, which was established...

"Prior to Korea's liberation from Japanese colonialism and the country's subsequent division at the end of World War II, the nation had enjoyed a long dynastic history that made the postwar partition particularly traumatic. The ensuing Cold War years soon spawned a very hot Korean War, subsequent decades of strained inter-Korean relations, and tensions in the region surrounding the peninsula. This volume provides readers who are unfamiliar with Korea's...

"During his research at The Public Records Office whilst acting in his capacity of Historian for the National Ex-prisoners of War Association, Philip Chinnery discovered some recently de-classified files on the Korean War. They contain records of investigations into 1,615 atrocities and war crimes perpetrated against troops serving with the United Nations command in Korea between 1950 and 1953. 10,233 of the victims were American. Much of the material...

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials...