Korean War: Open Questions

The Korean War was experienced in different ways by different people. Much of the literature about the war in the United States focuses on the experiences of a relatively predictable set of actors: political and military leaders and US combat forces. When bookstores and public libraries have any books on the Korean war at all, they tend to be military histories that are written from the American perspective. They focus primarily on US strategic thinking or the combat experience of American forces. While the new international history of the war that developed in the 1990s expanded on this perspective by incorporating the communist world, much of it was still focused on political elites -- Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and the like. Missing from these elite-driven histories is a sense of the war's traumatizing impact on those who felt it most viscerally: the Korean people.