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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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