WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This presentation examines how temporal erasure has shaped U.S. understandings of the Korean War. Cold War era historians commonly dated the war’s origins to 1950, when the Korean People’s Army invaded the South with Soviet support. This framing, however, erased the deeper roots of the conflict and their entanglement with US policy and global history: Korea’s artificial division after 1945, the U.S. military occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1947, and the U.S.-backed rise of Syngman Rhee’s authoritarian government in 1948. By exploring the institutional and political forces that produced and sustained this temporal erasure, I hope to reveal how historians have participated in reshaping public memory of the war. Exposing this history reveals s a need for further change in academic treatments of the war. While scholars such as Bruce Cumings and Allan R. Millett have long argued for understanding the war’s origins in the broader post–World War II context, the 1950 narrative continues to dominate in U.S. education. Even contemporary textbooks, including those used in Advanced Placement U.S. History courses, still reproduce Cold War–era framings. In alignment with the conference theme, “Being Global after Globalization”, I argue that addressing this persistent erasure requires an institutional effort across both higher education and general education—revising how the Korean War is taught, remembered, and situated within U.S. and global histories.