History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history’s most fascinating questions. For nearly seven decades, the Kim family dynasty has warned the North Korean people that the United States is a murderous ...read more
The Russo-Japanese War was a military conflict fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan from 1904 to 1905. Much of the fighting took place in what is now northeastern China. The Russo-Japanese War was also a naval conflict, with ships exchanging fire in the ...read more
During the 2018 Olympic Winter Games, outraged South Koreans demanded an apology from NBC after a commentatorasserted that Korea’s transformation into a global powerhouse was due to the “cultural, technological and economic example” of Japan. For many South Koreans, analyst ...read more
Lee Ok-seon was running an errand for her parents when it happened: a group of uniformed men burst out of a car, attacked her and dragged her into the vehicle. As they drove away, she had no idea that she would never see her parents again. She was 14 years old. That fateful ...read more
At the opening ceremonies of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games, on February 9, 2018, something spectacular happened: Athletes from North and South Korea, which have been bitterly divided for 73 years, marched beneath a unified flag. Though North and South appear no closer to ...read more
On November 29, 1987, two North Korean spies boarded a South Korean plane in Baghdad. The pair had used fake names and forged passports to pose as Japanese tourists. They’d also convinced security to let them keep the batteries in their carry-on “radio,” which they’d turned on to ...read more
North and South Korea have been divided for more than 70 years, ever since the Korean Peninsula became an unexpected casualty of the escalating Cold War between two rival superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. A Unified Korea For centuries before the division, the ...read more
South Korea is an East Asian nation of some 51 million people located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula, which borders the East Sea (Sea of Japan) and the Yellow Sea. The United States and Soviet Union divided control over the peninsula after World War II, and in ...read more
Predicting history is a notoriously tricky business, but our team of historians, experts and thought leaders have come up with lessons of the past to help us understand the future. So, what’s next for 2018? Inequality: In 2014 the French economist Thomas Piketty became a global ...read more
The history of American diplomacy stretches back to Ben Franklin, the country’s first diplomat, who helped the 13 colonies form official ties with France in 1778, during the Revolutionary War. Other nations that were among the earliest to make a formal diplomatic alliance with ...read more
The division of Korea is a legacy of the Cold War. Japan annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910, and the country spent the next 35 years under Japanese military rule. With Japan’s defeat in World War II, U.S. troops landed in the southern part of the peninsula, while Soviet forces ...read more
On this day in 2011, Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s enigmatic, reclusive dictator, dies of a heart attack while reportedly traveling on a train in his country. Kim, who assumed leadership of North Korea upon the death of his father in 1994, ruled the Communist nation with an iron ...read more
On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence vessel, is engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it is intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but ...read more
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a region on the Korean peninsula that demarcates North Korea from South Korea. Roughly following the 38th parallel, the 150-mile-long DMZ incorporates territory on both sides of the cease-fire line as it existed at the end of the Korean War ...read more
Kim Il Sung, the communist dictator of North Korea since 1948, dies of a heart attack at the age of 82. In the 1930s, Kim fought against the Japanese occupation of Korea and was singled out by Soviet authorities, who sent him to the USSR for military and political training. He ...read more
On this day in 1974, a fire rages out of control in a hotel in South Korea, killing 88 people, most of whom were enjoying a late-night party in a club on the hotel’s top floor. It was very early on a Sunday morning in the eastern part of downtown Seoul, when a guest staying on ...read more
The U.S. intelligence-gathering ship Pueblo is seized by North Korean naval vessels and charged with spying and violating North Korean territorial waters. Negotiations to free the 83-man crew of the U.S. ship dragged on for nearly a year, damaging the credibility of and ...read more
The crew and captain of the U.S. intelligence gathering ship Pueblo are released after 11 months imprisonment by the government of North Korea. The ship, and its 83-man crew, was seized by North Korean warships on January 23 and charged with intruding into North Korean waters. ...read more