I may be making a weird request since I’m not really sure about the exact nature of topics that are supposed to be on this subreddit and I’m a noob. So please let me know if this is the right place to post.
I’m a diaspora Korean that immigrated when I was quite young but would like to learn about proper/good sources to learn about history. When I was about ten, I asked my parents for a history book and they gave me one in English that wasn’t very good. To their credit, I think they just looked for a random Korean history book written in English. For example, a stupid paraphrasing from a portion of it (from my hazy memory) is that there were important economic policies by a “certain person” (cough cough) regarding state-guided industrialization with chaebols although there were human rights issues at the time. It didn’t go into explaining the big picture of why these were “good” in the long run and brushed over the latter issues(?!) implicitly saying this was the cost of the development.
Afterwards, I was pretty disturbed and surfed history articles on Korean Wikipedia (and some actual news articles) intermittently for the next few years. It was interesting, but I had no idea what to do since there were often normal and thorough-looking pages where the Talk page was a complete disaster. At the end, I was basically scared off from doing anything aside from very rarely dragging my parents to a museum during vacation and being generally awkward.
Since I’m pretty stupid, It looks like I’m back at it again after a few years. What are actual reasonable sources to read and learn important parts of Korean history? I know the language but don’t actually know how anything works in the country. Either language is fine although my Hanja/Chinese character knowledge is pretty shaky regarding old sources (aside from random stuff I learned from osmosis by vibe-learning Japanese and trying to coast with Korean grammar).
submitted by /u/LegFar8861
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