The start of the millennium saw a turning point in the transnational public memory of the Korean War. The year 2000 coincided with an unexpected shift in contemporary popular contestations of orthodox Korean War interpretation, which suddenly ramped up to a high-profile transnational scale after the largely domestic controversies of the postdemocratization-era history wars in South Korea during the 1990s. That is, in April 2000 the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism was awarded to the Associated Press for reporting on a massacre of unarmed Korean civilians committed by US soldiers a half century earlier. Although stories told by survivors of the No Gun Ri massacre had already appeared for several years in South Korea’s alternative press, the Pulitzer recognition of the AP team’s coverage, which drew heavily upon similar oral accounts, meant such narratives of war trauma would become known to a much larger audience beyond Korea. As issues long...
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