Брюс Камингс – лучшие книги

For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post–World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides.
Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.

Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed against great powers during the Cold War, and divided and decimated by the Korean War, has recently seen the first real hints of reunification. But positive movements forward are tempered by frustrating steps backward. In the late 1990s South Korea survived its most severe economic crisis since the Korean War, forcing a successful restructuring of its political economy. Suffering through floods, droughts, and a famine…

Previous studies of the origins of the Korean War have explained the outbreak of conventional fighting by focusing on the events of the weeks and months just prior to June 25, 1950. Bruce Cumings maintains, to the contrary, that its origins must be sought in the five-year period preceding the war, when Korea was dominated by widespread demands for political, economic, and social change.

Making extensive use of Korean language materials from North and South, and of heretofore classified documents, intelligence reports, and U.S. military government sources, the author first examines the background and setting of postwar Korean politics and the arrival of American and Soviet power in 1945. He then analyzes Korean politics and American policies in Seoul as well as in the hinterlands.

Arguing that the Korean War was civil and revolutionary in character, Professor Cumings shows how the basic issues over which the war was fought were apparent immediately after Korea's liberation from colonial rule in 1945, leading to the effective emergence of separate northern and southern regimes within a year, extensive political violence in the southern provinces and preemptive American policies designed to create a bulwark against revolution in the South and communism in the North.