http://www.froginawell.net/korea The Korea History Group Blog Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:05:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I’m having great fun with this class, but I’m still discovering vast areas of ignorance as we move along: Eunuchs: The Kabo reforms abolish the office of Eunuchs, but how many were there and how important? Seven Day Week? By 1896 there clearly is a seven day week in place, but when was that put in place? [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2010/02/things-i-dont-know-about-korea-part-2/ I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheistic faiths drawing on Confucian, Christian and indigenous magical traditions, with anti-foreign reformist programs and a counter-cultural ethos of equality.1 There are obvious differences, too, in teachings and in the leadership, but the structural [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2010/02/tonghak-and-taiping/ I’m back once again to this question of electricity and power in its various forms, as I think the long-term story of generating power in NE Asia (1880’s-present), and specifically on the Korean peninsula, sheds some interesting light on the transnational history of the contested region, this in distinct contrast to the individual national histories [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2010/02/generating-power-electric-hydroelectric-thermal-coal-atomic/ Now that I’m teaching my Korean History course I am, of course, running into questions I cannot answer. I’m going to post them here periodically: Though the Choson-era Korean Army (in its various commanderies and provincial forms) was conscripted from peasantry (and officered, it appears, by military Yangban), where did the Navy get its personnel? You [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2010/02/things-i-dont-know-about-korea-part-1-of-many/ I just heard from one of our fellow contributors here at Frog in a Well that the National Library of Korea now offers limited support for a variety of browsers! Up until now anyone trying to use any browser except Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system would not get far beyond the search component [...]]]> http://www.froginawell.net/korea/2009/11/now-in-firefox-korean-newspapers-at-the-national-library/