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Summary: A History By Bruce Cumings

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Bruce Cumings is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. A distinguished author who received the 2007 Kim Dae Jung Prize for Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights and Peace; Cumings book, "The Korean War: A History," is dedicated to the memory of the South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung, who promoted a "sunshine policy" with the North. A historian with many books chronicling the Korean War, Cumings explains how a post-WWII America became involved in a Korean civil war that to this day is still unresolved. Cumings explains how the Truman administration, US military, and American public misunderstood, underestimated, and ignored the effects of Japan's decades long colonialism of Koreans. After dividing the peninsula at the 38th parallel, leaving the north to the Soviet Union and the south to the US and NATO, the Truman administration sought to contain communist aggression. Cumings describes how American's role in the Korean War forever changed the way the United States views its role as a global military power. …show more content…

Records now reveal that the majority of the senseless massacres of the tens of thousands of Korean citizens and POWs were carried out by American forces and U.S. backed South Korean police authorities. Many of these massacres took place while American officials stood by and watched. Records now show the widespread devastation of major cities and villages wiped out by American napalm. Military censors controlled the

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According to contemporary scholar William Stueck writing from a post revisionist perspective, Cumings saw US foreign policy as intrinsically imperialistic and that the war was “based on a larger quest for global hegemony and was a response to the allegedly insatiable requirements of American capitalism .” Cumings also highlights that too often historians following the anti-communism philosophy let hindsight and the “atrocities of the current North Korean regime to influence their perceptions of the origins of the conflict ”. He also affirms that President Syngman Rhee of the ROK also desired to unite the peninsula under Western philosophies and his own command .American academic of the socialist persuasion Oliver Lee avowed that it was the South Koreans, with help from the American government, who initiated a series of incursions antecedent to the North Korean offensive of 1950 , quoting the official U.S. Army history of the American Military Advisory Group in Korea which stated, "some of the bloodiest engagements were caused by South Korean units securing and preparing defensive positions that were either astride or north of the 38th parallel [prior to 25th June 1950]. ” With the

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