For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times—a period of unprecedented eco­nomic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In his latest book, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 , historian Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea’s dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country’s long history of militarization—a history personified in South Korea’s paramount leader, Park Chung Hee.

Carter Eckert is the Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History at Harvard University. Eckert is the author of Offspring of Empire: The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism 1876-1945, which received the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association, as well as the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. In 1996-97 he was a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Eckert’s latest book is Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.