| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

William Stueck, editor. The Korean War in World History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2004. Pp. 203. $35.00.

Sandwiched between the most destructive war in human history on the one side, and America's longest war and first decisive defeat on the other, the relatively brief and inconclusively ended Korean conflict has drawn considerably less attention from historians than have America's other major twentieth-century wars. Nevertheless, Korea can no longer be called the "forgotten war," as it once was. Beginning in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam debacle, a few historians chose to reexamine America's previous Cold War conflict in East Asia. The most perspicacious of these historians was Bruce Cumings, whose two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990), based on extensive and ground-breaking research in American and South Korean documents (among many other sources), painted a complex and multifaceted portrait of a war that had long been seen in the West as a straightforward act of Soviet aggression via its North Korean proxy. Cumings was also the first American historian to delve deeply into domestic conditions in Korea—especially in the South—during the years leading to the war, and to stress Korean agency rather than portray Koreans as mere pawns of the superpowers. What was still missing, however, was the evidence from the "other side" of the conflict: the communist allies whose archives, unlike those of the United States, remained utterly closed to historians. This changed with the opening of Soviet archives following the collapse of the USSR, and the publication of numerous memoirs and document collections from China in the 1990s. Although access to primary sources remains far from complete (North Korea remains essentially off limits to foreign research on this topic, Chinese archives have yet to be opened, and Russian materials are less accessible than they were a decade ago), over the past fifteen years the history of the Korean War has gradually been rewritten on the basis of new information in a post-Cold War climate.

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