Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades.

Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.’s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations.

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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