An overlooked dimension of the Korean War: The role of Christianity and American missionaries in the rise of Korean nationalism, anti -colonialism, and eventual civil war, 1884-1953

This dissertation reveals how religious factors affected the development of the Korean War. Much prior research has analyzed the causes and nature of the Korean War, in part because of the war\u27s impact upon later events, from the Cold War to the present day geopolitical standoff. Though the war has been much-studied, religious factors have rarely been included in these analyses. This de-emphasis of religion may be a justifiable simplification in general war historiographies, but not in the specific case of Korea. This current study uncovers the unique role of religion in Korean-American relations and in Korean culture and politics, prior-to-and-during the time of the Korean War.;The Korean War ushered in a time of intimate collaboration between state and non-state actors, unparalleled in American diplomatic and military history. Because American missionaries had been working among Koreans for many years, they possessed the language skills, human connections, and geographical knowledge that the US military lacked. From the early days within the Pusan Perimeter through the late period at P\u27anmunjo˘m, American missionaries were highly visible on the frontline, at the negotiation table, and in the POW camps. They were also important to the battle of propaganda. their letters and reports aroused sympathy in America for the Korea people.;In addition to the contributions of American Missionaries, the effect of Korean Christians was an equally important factor to the shaping of the conflict. Churches were rather influential within Korean society; clergymen were active in Korean politics; and many of the top politicians were Christians. Christianity was a major obstacle to Communist control of the North and subversive activities in the South. With the assistance of foreign funding, churches were transformed by the ravages of war into an important source of charitable assistance for millions of impoverished refugees. Although this study looks at religious factors in general, the discussion focuses primarily on Protestant churches and Protestant missionaries. These Protestant churches, of all religious institutions in Korea; exerted an influence far disproportionate to their per capita membership. Similarly, these Protestant missionaries, of all religious actors, had significant influence upon the American military and upon the American public. In particular, the majority of missionaries who stayed behind and worked effectively with the Korean government and US military were from the American Presbyterian missions. They took the initiative on relief efforts and set the standard for others to follow.;This dissertation makes an important contribution to religious history as well. In the process of assessing the impact of Christianity upon the Korean War, this dissertation begins by examining Christianity\u27s development within Korea, primarily from the arrival of American missionaries in the late Choso˘n period. Christianity is found to have had a strong impact upon Korea\u27s social development, internal politics, and foreign-relations. The Christian community was an important part of the independence movement against Japanese control. When one considers that South Korea has emerged today as one of the most Christianized of nations, that every elected Korean president has been a Christian, and that Korea now sends out more missionaries than any nation besides America, then the historical value of such a study of into Christianity\u27s origins becomes clear

Re-Mining Makatea: People, Politics and Phosphate Rock

This thesis is a study of the processes involved in the making, unmaking and potential remaking of a Pacific phosphate island. It is a history of Makatea, an uplifted coral atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago (French Polynesia), mined by a French private company from 1908 to 1966 and presently coveted by an Australian-financed re-mining project called Avenir Makatea. Using predominantly French, and English-language archival sources, I excavate aspects of the island's past, re-visiting important moments in time before, during and after the mine to demonstrate how phosphate islands are not just born but consciously, and often painstakingly, made. In presenting this history, I am concerned with exploring the relationship between human agency and broader environmental, economic or political circumstances; emphasizing through the extended case study of Makatea that phosphate islands exist only insofar as they belong to a complex set of local and global interrelationships involving landowners, labourers, companies, markets, governments, and environmental conditions, with each of these contingencies being open to contestation and negotiation. Like recent historical studies on guano and phosphate islands, this thesis reinforces the link between extractive colonialism in the Pacific and input-intensive agricultural production in the neo-European nations of the Pacific Rim. However, unlike the examples of Nauru and Banaba, the particular historical circumstances of Makatea - belonging to a French colony, for one; mined by a private company, for another - meant that the island was subjected to both a shorter and less extensive period of mining, providing space for a different, more hopeful kind of historical narrative where the phosphate imperialism of the 20th century does not necessarily define the island's past or future. As the first extended study of an island relegated by some Anglophone commentators to the status of the 'third phosphate island', this thesis adds to a growing historiography on the Pacific phosphate industry. It adds nuance to a French historiographical tradition that overlooks the British influence on the making of the industry and downplays the significance of the Makatea experience for the later nuclear era in French Polynesia. Over six chapters, this thesis traces Makatea's development from a lush Polynesian island, to a quintessential mined land and back again. It seeks to provide much needed context for present debates within French Polynesia about Makatea's future identity and whether it will revert once more to a phosphate island or continue to develop in a sustainable and self-defined direction with less reliance on the natural resource that nonetheless put the island onto the world map. Ultimately, this study is a reminder that in an era that has witnessed a movement towards global history, stories of small places, and islands in particular, still matter

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed