General Overview
How accurately is Korea depicted in American reference works?
For a country that has had a U.S. presence since 1945, many Americans know very little about South Korea. Interestingly, they know more about our former enemy, Japan, than our then and current ally. Although South Korea leads the mobile communications industry and produces many other products that Americans use and enjoy, and despite the current media focus on North Korea, Americans as a whole cannot find either country on a map or distinguish which is which. For reasons unknown, there is little interest in the only remaining divided people in the world.
Although many reference works give little or no attention to Korea at all, the problem becomes even more magnified when reference works misrepresent Korea, it's history, and culture, either by less-than-thorough research or unfair and negative depictions. This is a problem that Koreans have decried for years, but one that has not yet been totally remedied. Our goal has been to find these errors or misrepresentations and then correct them.
We have gone through several reference works and divided them into five categories. They are: multi-volume encyclopedias, single-volume encyclopedias, special topic encyclopedias, children's encyclopedias, and yearbooks. For each individual publication, we have included a heading with information on the title, publisher, ISBN, and book year. Then we have created tables listing page numbers where errors occur, what the errors are, and corrections. In cases where necessary, we have also included comments at the end.
We hope our work will be beneficial to students, teachers, researchers, Korean-American groups, business leaders, government workers, and anyone interested in Korea. We hope publishers will appreciate our research and take the necessary steps to improve future publications.
This work has been supported by a grant from the Korean Overseas
Information Service.
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All content copyright 2008 David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.
