(The Wilson Center’s North Korean International Documentation Project (NKIDP) does innovative historical work collecting, translating, comparing, and analyzing records kept on the DPRK in the archives of formerly (and some currenty) communist countries. They recently held an innovative conference where they brough in period policy makers to discuss and comment on these archival records.)
NKIDP publishes document reader from international conference “Crisis and Confrontation on the Korean Peninsula: 1968-1969”
September 8-9, 2008
Crisis and Confrontation on the Korean Peninsula: 1968-1969 focused on the two tumultuous years which saw the capture of the U.S. Navy’s intelligence ship USS Pueblo by the DPRK, the North Korean attempt to assassinate ROK President Park Chunghee with a cross-border commando raid on the Blue House, and numerous other provocative incidents.
The conference’s document reader—a 1200 page collection of newly declassified documents from South Korean, American, and former communist bloc archives–is the most comprehensive collection of primary source materials on US-ROK-DPRK relations during the late 1960s ever assembled, and it is now available for download free of charge from NKIDP.
Armed with this document reader, scholars from around the world, and former policy-makers from the United States, South Korea, and the former communist bloc gathered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington for two days of discussions.
These discussions gave historians the opportunity to interact with the very officials whose reports and memoranda comprised the document reader, and will result in a more nuanced understanding of US-ROK-DPRK relations during the late 1960s.
