With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Brad Hirschfield: Remembering Korea: The Forgotten War

[Brad Hirschfield is the author of You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, and is the President of Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership]

Sixty years ago today, North Korean soldiers crossed the 38th Parallel and began the Korean War – what has come to be called America’s Forgotten War. Oddly, by naming it the Forgotten War, it began to be remembered, and that raises the larger questions of why we forget or remember events in our lives and in our history....

Ultimately memory is not simply a fact or reality; it is something to be created and pursued. And in many ways, so is forgetting, which brings me back to Korea. Why is it that a conflict that dragged on (why, by the way, do conflicts always “drag on”?) and ultimately cost 2 million lives, including the lives of 54,000 U.S. military personnel, went largely ignored and mostly forgotten for so many years? And why now are we returning to try and recall it with everything from national memorials to TV shows and books about “America’s Forgotten War”?...
Read entire article at Fox News