A History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative by Kyung Moon Hwang (review)

The need to please two very different audiences—professors and undergraduates—makes writing an introductory history textbook a true challenge. Such a book must be comprehensive and accurate, yet concise, and requires the author to include fields of academic endeavor that can lay far outside his or her expertise while paring down much of the material related to that scholar’s own specialty. A textbook must also provide hard facts while recounting memorable stories that will stick with students even when the course is over. All of this must be done with a writing style that is academic, detailed, colorful, and fluid, for if it is not, the pedagogical value of the text will be lost and students will not understand it or even read it. Save for a few minor issues, Kyung Moon Hwang’s A History of Korea manages to successfully surmount these difficulties, producing a text that is not only ideally suited for the undergraduate classroom (or for upper-level high school courses), but which a specialist in Korean history can read, learn from, and enjoy.

Hwang’s textbook includes an introduction, twenty-seven chapters, a handy chapter-by-chapter bibliography, and a useful index. With approximately 280 pages of text, each chapter is only about nine to twelve pages in length. While less than half as long as the number of pages in a typical chapter from a monograph (or textbook for that matter), the short chapters work well for the intended undergraduate audience. Each chapter can be read in just a few minutes, allowing students ready access to what for many will be a largely unfamiliar history. Moreover, as each of these short chapters is largely self-contained, it is easy for an instructor to construct a syllabus with this text, rearrange the order of chapters, or supplement the textbook with other readings.

Because there are so many chapters, it is not possible in a review to give a detailed description of each one. I will instead focus on providing a general idea of the material covered and the layout of a typical chapter. While Hwang does begin with a discussion of the story of Tan’gun and the mythical origins of Koreans, his primary focus in his first chapter is the kingdom of Koguryŏ and its relationship with the two kingdoms of Paekche and Silla. He ends his survey of Korean history with the suicide of former president Roh Moo-hyun (No Muhyŏn) and the presidency of Lee Myung-bak (Yi Myŏngbak). Hwang spends three chapters on the Three Kingdoms period, three on Koryŏ, one on the Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, eight on Chosŏn, four on the Japanese Colonial Period, one on the years 1945 to 1950, one on the Korean War, and ends with two on North Korea and four on South Korea.

The general structure of each chapter is worthy of note. A brief chronology of the period covered by the chapter is first provided. An anecdote from Korean history introducing the themes that will serve as the foci is then given, followed by the main text of the chapter, which is helpfully divided by headings every two to three pages. This layout is particularly helpful for students who are new to history or to Korea (or both) because it allows Hwang to repeat, without being repetitious, the main characters, themes, and facts that he wants students to understand and remember. An important person might be mentioned in the chronology, be a major character in the anecdote, and then be referred to in one or more of the sections. Hwang’s skillful weaving together of these different elements makes this work especially enjoyable to read and, I believe, particularly beneficial to undergraduates as a textbook. To give but one example, in chapter 3, “The Unified Silla Kingdom,” Hwang describes the assassination of Chang Pogo in 846, and then continually refers back to Chang in...