This Economist article is mostly about China and India, but notes South Korea’s retreat from the brink of a gender imbalance disaster.
NYTimes reports on the arrest of a man with 1700 pairs of (allegedly) stolen shoes, and the larger problem of shoe management in a society which often goes shoeless.
North Korea has stopped using money. All transactions to be carried out by bank transfer and certified check.
Turns out there’s actually an interesting debate about whether North Korea has claimed supernatural powers for their leading family.
It was the Kwangju Uprising whose name we couldn’t come up with in class, and the thirtieth anniversary is approaching quickly.
Did I mention that South Korea was the most “wired” nation in the world? It also has world-class text messagers.
The main page at http://dresnerkorea.edublogs.org is structured like a blog, with the most recent postings at the top. I will use it for announcements, handouts, recommendations of interesting things to read, special events, etc. If you use an RSS feed reader, you can follow the blog that way; otherwise, it’s a good idea to check in every few days.
There are also some stable pages which will be useful resources, most of which can be accessed through the tabs in the blog header. The “Korea Since 1700 (spring 2010)” tab contains the complete course schedule, including links to assignments, policies, handouts, etc. You can find the syllabus through that page, or through the “syllabi” tab. If there are changes to the schedule or assignments, I will announce them in class, on the blog, and I will change the schedule (but the syllabus will remain unchanged); in the event of a discrepancy between the syllabus and schedule (the result of a schedule change or other unforseen circumstance), the schedule is to be considered the authoritative source.
I recommend that you read the syllabus before class on Friday — I will not be distributing paper copies of the syllabus, or most of the assignments and handouts; if you need a paper copy, you are free to print them out yourself — and I will be happy to answer any questions about it at that point.
I also recommend that you get hold of the textbooks as soon as possible. The first assigned reading is in ten days.
See you Friday!
The following books will be required reading for Hist 501-03 and Hist 700-03 (Graduate students will have the same readings, but additional assignments):
- Bipolar orders: the two Koreas since 1989 By Hyung Gu Lynn. Zed Books, 2007. ISBN 1842777432 or 9781842777435
- Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Choe, Lee, de Bary. Columbia University Press, 2000. ISBN 0231120311 or 978-0231120319
- Korea Old and New: A History, Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson and Wagner. Harvard Korea Institute, 1991. ISBN 0962771309 or 978-0962771309
You can purchase these from the bookstore, or any other source, but be aware that we will be using the Sources and History texts from the very beginning of the semester.
