ABSTRACT
Historians acknowledge that the Korean War was long the object of unwarranted neglect, in spite of the catastrophic impact it had on the lives of the Korean people. Indeed, for more than two decades after a truce ended the fighting on July 27, 1953, scholars devoted only modest attention to examining its causes and consequences. This, combined with the lack of American public interest in the conflict, resulted in Clay Blair naming his detailed study of it The Forgotten War (1986). Callum A. MacDonald (1986) labeled Korea “The War Before Vietnam” and John Halliday and Bruce Cumings titled their account of the conflict The Unknown War (1988). Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr. (2001), who has written about the domestic impact of the war on the United States, notes that Korea was a very politicized and inconclusive limited war that Americans preferred to forget. Further, its placement between the “good war” of World War II and “bad war” in Vietnam obscured Korea. However, publication of new studies of the war in the 1980s and access to Communist sources in the 1990s revitalized the historiography of the Korean War, elevating public knowledge about the conflict. More important, some scholars concluded that the Korean conflict was the most important event of the early Cold War.
