Between the “Forgotten War” and the “Unknown War”

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on the historiography of Korean War studies in American academia. Unlike previous studies that comprehensively cover the research of American academics, this article examines how the American Korean Studies community, which is part of the American academic community, has dealt with the topic of the Korean War, and explores historically how the Korean War could be transformed from a ‘forgotten war’ to an ‘unknown war’ in American academia. Initially, the focus of Korean War studies in the United States was on the ‘war’ in the Far East/Northeast Asia, and the Korean War was analyzed as part of the Soviet Union’s global strategy. To focus on the matter of ‘Korea’, several conditions had to be met. First, an intellectual climate had to emerge in which Asian nationalism was understood separately from communism. Next, American Korean studies had to grow to provide and interpret information about Korea in the United States. Through the growth of Korean studies in Amercia, the political dynamics of the Korean people in the Korean War began to receive attention. Paradoxically, the work of American Korean scholars has simultaneously enabled reflective questions about America’s role in the Korean War. Serious discussions began to take place about why the Korean War has been forgotten in the United States and what more needs to be learned about it if it is indeed an ‘unknown war’. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an ‘international turn’ in U.S. academia to study the Korean War at an international level, with a focus on declassified documents from the former communist regime. But there is much more to learn about this ‘unknown war’ than what is in the archives. Through collaborations and connections with South Korean scholars, who have grown rapidly since democratization, American Korean studies has sought to pursue a different dimension of the study of the Korean War: a ‘socio-cultural turn’, or ‘humanistic turn.’ Through these activities, the ‘unknown war’ is remembered in new ways, and new questions are still being asked today.