The Korean peninsula has been divided into two hostile camps for over a half century. Both North and South Koreans today lament this tragedy and dream of reunification. Yet even before the country's division in 1945 by Soviet and US occupation forces following World War II, the historical relationship between north and south was hardly one of national unity and harmony. In fact, as the articles in Sun Joo Kim's The Northern Region of Korea show, the northern provinces experienced marginalization and discrimination by the capital and the southern provinces throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), and the northern region, moreover, developed a distinctive cultural identity.
Kim's previous work, Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), examines the first of the major uprisings in the nineteenth century and identifies its causes in local sources—the politics, society, and culture of the northwestern...
