What do the Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee regimes mean to us?

In the 60 years of modern Korean history, the period primarily examined in this book is the 30 years from liberation in 1945 to the establishment of the Yushin regime in 1972. This period can be said to be a period of national construction and industrialization, that is, the founding of the nation and the enrichment of the nation.
The author, who presents a different interpretation of history from revisionists and the "386 Generation," views modern Korean history from a more macroscopic and comparative perspective, rather than being caught up in a microscopic, nationalistic, or moralistic perspective.

The author approaches the division process from the perspective of the global historical development of the Cold War, and then analyzes land reform and the Korean War from the perspective of state formation and national formation. The author positions the 1950s as a budding period preparing for the development and dynamism of the 1960s and beyond, and reexamines the short life of the Chang Myon regime and the rapid economic development under the Park Chung-hee regime from the perspective of the formation and development of a developmental state.

It covers modern Korean history from liberation to the Park Chung-hee Yushin era.
The author, a political scientist, collected and meticulously reviewed primary sources with more effort than a historian, analyzing the political history of South Korea up to the late 1970s from a comparative historical perspective.
The objectivity of his interpretation, based on such analysis, is accepted by scholars of both the left and the right, regardless of ideological leanings.

This book serves as a compass to correct the errors that many academic studies have revealed due to the generalities and specificities inherent in modern Korean history.
For a long time, scholars in our society, regardless of their political affiliation, have tended to selectively and arbitrarily piece together the special experiences and general phenomena of modern Korea after liberation, and cleverly utilize them to rationalize their arguments.
This book goes beyond such limitations and objectively interprets modern history by establishing a sophisticated analytical framework that uses world historical generalities as the warp and national historical specificities as the weft.