Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for US troops to arrive, which started almost three years of US military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades.

Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation, and describes how the US’s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations.

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of US immigration and foreign relations, focusing on US-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the US-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press, 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize.

Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.