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The last ten years has witnessed a veritable surge in the writing of Korean history textbooks. Clearly, publishers have learned that there is a buck to be made from this young and growing field. For teachers, this boon has the decided advantage of more than doubling the number of textbooks available in English. To the most recent works of Michael Robinson, Keith Pratt, and Kyung Moon Hwang, Michael Seth has added the most ambitious volume in the past ten years, coming in at just over 500 pages of text, A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present.
It will be only the most eager of students who is willing to read the entirety of a book that lands with a loud thump on one's desk, but for those who persevere, the rewards will be plenty. Seth has written a highly readable account starting with the earliest inhabitants of the peninsula down to the first decade of our own century. For teachers keen to teach through primary sources, Seth has followed each chapter with a key text. Though not the original translations of the author, these texts enrich the narrative. In...