A Fractured Liberation

Drawing from diaries, military records, literary works, and his own family’s history, Chang ponders what could have become of ‘Korea’s Asian Spring.’ * New Yorker *
An engaging history in an approachable style for a wide audience. – Stephen Mercado * Asian Review of Books *
A welcome addition to the growing field of research on this formative period of Korean history…Chang’s book sets out to uncover roads not taken…providing a succinct, engaging, and at times emotionally charged work firmly grounded in relevant primary sources…[this book] is an engaging, highly readable, and compelling portrayal of the American occupation of Korea and its clear implications for the Korean Peninsula today. – Daniel Pieper * Australian Book Review *
Chang has written a compelling narrative that conveys to the reader a sense of what it must have been like to live through a period so marked by hope, uncertainty, despair, and violence…a highly accessible account of liberated Korea. – David P. Fields * Pacific Affairs *
Well-researched, compelling and unapologetic in its addressing of uncomfortable truths. Chang skillfully illustrates the ways in which the US government weaponised Korean people against themselves to further propel the US’s Cold War anti-Communist aspirations while, at the same time, horrifyingly employing Japanese colonial techniques of governance to weaponise the southern portion of the Korean peninsula as its own Eastern Hemisphere chess piece. – Taeyeon Song * Mekong Review *
The book is written with style, diverse perspectives, and pace…It is a fine resource for specialist historians of postwar Asia, postcolonial state building, US-Korea relations, and for general readers looking for something beyond a simple binary set up to the Korean War. – Adam Cathcart * Sino-NK *
Examines one of the most fascinating and tragic periods in modern Korean history…engaging and well-documented study sheds new light on a period that…has received relatively little scholarly attention. It will be of interest not only to historians of modern Korea and the Cold War in East Asia but also to scholars of international relations concerned with occupation and nation-building. – Alexander Bukh * New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies *
Shine[s]…a valuable light on a little-known but important piece of history. * Kirkus Reviews *
The US military occupation of Korea after World War II lasted only a few years, but they were fateful ones, as Kornel Chang shows. A Fractured Liberation is an absorbing, poignant account of a political tragedy: how a newly freed country teeming with democratic movements was plunged into autocracy and permanently, painfully divided. – Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
As the child of a Korean catapulted from the chaos and the broad possibilities of post–WWII Korea into a future he never could have predicted, I’ve been fascinated by this period, and struggling to understand it, for years. The lack of deep-diving histories has slowed me down and frustrated me. Now Kornel Chang, with A Fractured Liberation, has changed all that. His book is indispensable. – Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise
Most Americans know nothing about the US occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948, but it deeply shaped postwar Korean history and was a crucial antecedent to the origins of the Korean War. Kornel Chang has written a brilliant analysis of this episode that will be of equal value to the specialist and the general reader. Lively, very well written and researched, often funny, but also deadly serious, it deserves a wide audience. – Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War: A History
A Fractured Liberation is a fascinating study of a moment in South Korean history that could have set the peninsula on a radically different course. Using new materials and written in a lively, engaging style, Chang’s work illuminates a host of hitherto neglected reformist figures, both Korean and American, and their heroic but tragically unsuccessful efforts to avoid a permanent division of Korea. – Carter J. Eckert, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea

Kornel Chang is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Prize in History. He is Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University–Newark.

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