Description
A History of Korea, a product of a particular moment in South Korean social and political history, is again a relevant and timely introduction to Korea. Published in the aftermath of the popular resistance movements of the late 1980s that brought an end to military dictatorship and ushered in direct elections for the presidency of South Korea. The volume is jointly written by historians of the Korean Historical Research Association. Read more
The historians who compiled the volume were not dispassionate recorders of those events but rather active participants in the democracy movements of the time, who understood their scholarship as a contribution to popular resistance against military rule and as a tool for the democratisation and unification of Korea
These historians were writing against previous understandings of Korean history that they perceived as legitimising political and economic oppression from both Korean élites and foreign powers. As they stood in opposition to previous histories and their political underpinnings, they proposed their own visions of past, present, and future Korean societies. In so doing, they helped move the popular struggle for the democratisation of South Korea towards the centre of the national narrative
When published A History of Korea was hailed as “a manifesto, a conscious call for a particular interpretation of Korean history for deployment in the democratisation, unification, and class liberation movements of the period.”
![The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, by Kim Bongryol, is the first English-language distillation of Kim Bongryol's ideas on Korean architecture, as a whole and in its various manifestations, and architecture's role in the history of Korea. From the time of its original Korean publication the book has been widely seen as a response to the growing international interest in Korean architecture, its tangible historical and contemporary forms, and a multidisciplinary contribution to the discourse that has resulted in new writing and audiovisual output exploring principal features and themes, materials, techniques and methodologies particular to the genre. This revised and updated English version of Kim Bongryol's original three-volume book was published in two editions, hard cover [9781872843827] and soft cover [9781872843834], as part of Saffron Korea Library Series [ISSN 1748-0477].](http://saffronbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/9781872843834.jpg)
