Not Forgotten: The Korean War in American Public Memory, 1950-2017

Abstract

The “forgotten war” is the label most frequently used to recall the conflict that took place in Korea from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, with variations of this phrase found in museum exhibitions and monuments across the country. Since the widespread presence of so many mentions of Korea clearly demonstrates that the Korean War is not forgotten, this project critically evaluates several forms of public memory (including museum exhibitions, historical scholarship, films and television shows, state and local monuments, and memorial infrastructure including bridges, highways, buildings, and trees) in order to explore how the war has come to be called forgotten. This project also seeks to examine the foreign policy issues of labeling the Korean War as forgotten, by exploring how it is recalled globally and why it is essential to remember details about the war. This project also seeks to fill a niche in the scholarly literature on public memory of American wars by examining Korea as prior studies have both WWII and Vietnam. In addition, this project intervenes in several more scholarly conversations ranging from the argument that the television series M*A*S*H was not primarily an allegory for Vietnam, as is often alleged, to the contention that a Korean Anti-War Movement was much more widespread than has been appreciated by academics interested in the history of activism. This dissertation is designed to highlight the ongoing need to remember the Korean War in detail, given the threats to world peace made by North Korea, and to make clear that it is vital to understand the enduring legacy of the war for twenty-first century diplomacy, which can only be done by examining how the war has been publicly recalled and why the forgotten war label persists despite evidence that Korea has been widely remembered.