History, Medieval, Retrospective
Stuart Gorman
The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Bruce Cummings

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Korea’s Place in the Sun by Bruce Cumings

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Korea’s Place in the Sun by Bruce Cumings

I was really impressed with Bruce Cumings’ history of the Korean War, and I was looking for a good general history of Korea, so it didn’t take much of a recommendation to push me towards grabbing a copy of Korea’s Place in the Sun. This is a history of modern Korea, primarily focused on 1850-2000, but it includes a decent overview of Korea’s earlier history in its opening chapter. This is because Cumings wants to emphasize how long Korea has existed as a single nation, because it is essential to understanding the impact of first Japanese colonization and then the division between north and south on the Korean psyche and modern history. Overall, I was really impressed with Korea’s Place in the Sun, it is an engaging if dense history of a fascinating country that does its best to take some very complex topics and make them easier to understand.

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The Korean War by Bruce Cumings

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The Korean War by Bruce Cumings

The greatest gift a work of history can give is to take a subject that you thought you knew something about and to show you that either your knowledge was far from extensive or it was fundamentally flawed. Years ago, Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston’s book on Crécy complicated the narrative of that battle to such a degree that I’m still reeling from the discovery. Bruce Cummings’ history of the Korean War has achieved a similar feat. This slim 250-page volume radically reframes the war in a way that challenged all my base assumptions about what I thought I knew and has made me think about the Korean War in a completely different way. I’m not sure that I will ever be the same. In complicating the war, Cummings’ digs up hard truths that many would prefer to forget, and which are largely absent from a bittersweet if essentially triumphalist narrative of the war that prevails in many other accounts. This book is essential reading, but at the same time I’m not sure if its impact can be felt as keenly if you haven’t already read at least one other book on the subject which makes me hesitate to recommend it as the best introductory history of the topic.