Category: hst259

I decided on option one.  I learned a lot in this class, from Korean history to tools historians use to the price of textbooks and the impact of open source resources.  This class was definitely not what I expected when I signed up and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did!  Starting with the boring list of stuff I specifically remember, the middle portion of the class really stuck with me, after we got into a rhythm and got into the details of colonial Korea.  I found this to be the most interesting to me; it even stuck with through all the corona stuff we had to deal with.  I think part of this was due to the discussion posts we had to make, I felt like that really made me interact with the material a lot more than I previously did.  Of course I read for every class, but when preparing a written paragraph compared to discussion, I felt there was more pressure to sound like you really prepared for it, but it also helped this was the part of the class I was really looking forward to.  The tools of a historian were really cool and I didn’t even notice I was learning it until I got to the final project and took a step back and said “wow I’m doing everything she talked about in the beginning of the semester.”  I’ve always thought the best way to learn academic skills was to do it in a way that is hidden to the students, like implementing it subconsciously through the assignments we do and we did exactly that.  For what I feel like should be a general idea everyone knows about Korean history, I think that the best thing would be the Korea war.  I think that in America we don’t give this war the credit it deserves for the impact it had.  It had an effect on the Korean peninsula that is still seen to this day and Americans consider it the forgotten war.  Besides that, this was a fun class!  Thank you for a great semester!

So this week was a sort of break from Korean History as we, as students, designed how we would like the material to be taught and what topics we were interested in. The entirety of Friday’s class was all about organizing the next 17 classes sessions with the topics we voted on to learn. Me, personally didn’t really help into this because it’s not like I could stop going to class because I don’t like the order the material is being taught, so I just watched the ball roll and determine to teach in chronological order. Overall though, I’m excited to learn about the relations between Korea and Japan, specifically in the time of the Shogun and samurais as well as the Korean War because I felt that it didn’t get a lot of attention in my high school history class so it’ll be cool to take an in depth look at that conflict.

The best thing we did this week was probably breaking up into groups to create things like time lines, collections of maps, and a reference sheet. I really thought that was a creative way to reinforce our understanding of the early Korean subjects we were discussing. As for me, I was part of the map group and I went in thinking maps were just there; they were a fact. So, it was very interesting to see how much bias goes into maps especially ancient ones which is ironic because I doubt people that lived in those areas at that time cared a lot about boarders as big as the ones that are being disputed. It was also pretty cool seeing the variations in Chinese versus Korean maps and how much land each nation gave each other as well as seeing the expansion of Korea as the Chinese empire slowly shrank. It was like one of those time lapse things!

“Korea History 500 CE.” TimeMaps. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.timemaps.com/history/korea-500ad/.

This is my first post. Gonna see what happens when I post it