''Doksa Sillon'' or ''A New Reading of History'' (1908) is a book that discusses the

history of Korea The Lower Paleolithic era in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria began roughly half a million years ago. Christopher J. Norton, "The Current State of Korean Paleoanthropology", (2000), ''Journal of Human Evolution'', 38: 803–825. The earlies ...

from the time of the mythical

Dangun Dangun (; ) or Dangun Wanggeom (; ) was the legendary founder and god-king of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom, around present-day Liaoning province in Northeast China and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. He is said to be the "gran ...

to the fall of the kingdom of

Balhae Balhae ( ko, 발해, zh, c=渤海, p=Bóhǎi, russian: Бохай, translit=Bokhay, ), also rendered as Bohai, was a multi-ethnic kingdom whose land extends to what is today Northeast China, the Korean Peninsula and the Russian Far East. It wa ...

in 926 CE. Its author––historian, essayist, and

independence Independence is a condition of a person, nation, country, or state in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the statu ...

activist

Shin Chaeho Sin Chaeho, or Shin Chae-ho (; November 7, 1880 – February 21, 1936), was a Korean independence activist, historian, anarchist, nationalist, and a founder of Korean nationalist historiography (민족 사학, ''minjok sahak''; sometimes shortene ...

(1880–1936)––first published it as a series of articles in the '' Daehan Maeil Sinbo'' (the ''Korea Daily News''), of which he was the editor-in-chief.Andre Schmid, ''Korea Between Empires, 1895-1910'' (2002), p. 181. As the first work to equate the history of Korea with the history of the Korean race (''minjok''), ''Doksa Sillon'' rejected the conventional

Confucian Confucianism, also known as Ruism or Ru classicism, is a system of thought and behavior originating in ancient China. Variously described as tradition, a philosophy, a Religious Confucianism, religion, a humanistic or rationalistic religion, ...

histories that focused on the rise and fall of dynasties as well as the Japanese

Pan-Asianist Satellite photograph of Asia in orthographic projection. Pan-Asianism (''also known as Asianism or Greater Asianism'') is an ideology aimed at creating a political and economic unity among Asian peoples. Various theories and movements of Pan-Asi ...

claims that Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese were all part of the "East Asian" or "

yellow Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 575585 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In the R ...

" race. Influenced by

Social Darwinism Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in We ...

, Shin portrayed the Korean ''minjok'' as a warlike race (which he called "Buyeo" after the name of an ancient kingdom) that had constantly fought to preserve Korean identity but had later been weakened by Confucianized elites like the ''

yangban The ''yangban'' () were part of the traditional ruling class or gentry of dynastic Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. The ''yangban'' were mainly composed of highly educated civil servants and military officers—landed or unlanded aristocrats ...

'' of the

Joseon Dynasty Joseon (; ; Middle Korean: 됴ᇢ〯션〮 Dyǒw syéon or 됴ᇢ〯션〯 Dyǒw syěon), officially the Great Joseon (; ), was the last dynastic kingdom of Korea, lasting just over 500 years. It was founded by Yi Seong-gye in July 1392 and re ...

. ''Doksa Sillon'' was one of the earliest expressions of

Korean ethnic nationalism Korean ethnic nationalism, or Korean racial nationalism, is a racial, chauvinist and ethnosupremacist political ideology and a form of ethnic and racial identity that is widely prevalent by the Korean people in Korea, particularly in South K ...

and it laid the foundation for

Korean nationalist historiography Korean nationalist historiography is a way of writing Korean history that centers on the Korean '' minjok'', an ethnically or racially defined Korean nation. This kind of historiography emerged in the early twentieth century among Korean intell ...

, which used the study of ancient Korea to resist Japanese

colonial Colonial or The Colonial may refer to: * Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology) Architecture * American colonial architecture * French Colonial * Spanish Colonial architecture Automobiles * Colonial (1920 au ...

scholarship while Korea was under Japanese rule.Key S. Ryang, "Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936) and Modern Korean Historiography" (1987); Stella Yingzi Xu, "That glorious ancient history of our nation" (2007), p. 171.

Notes

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Bibliography

*Em, Henry H. (1998). "Democracy and Korean Unification from a Post-Nationalist Perspective." ''Asea yongu'' 41.2: 43-74. *Em, Henry H. (1999). "''Minjok'' as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Sin Ch'aeho's Historiography." In ''Colonial Modernity in Korea'', edited by Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, pp. 336–61. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press. *Jager, Sheila Miyoshi. (2003).
Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism
'. New York: M.E. Sharpe. *Kim Bongjin. (2011). "Sin Ch'ae-ho: 'A Critique of Easternism,' 1909." In Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman, eds., ''Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850-1920'', pp. 191–94. Plymouth, England: Rowman & Littlefield. *Ryang, Key S. (1987). "Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936) and Modern Korean Historiography." ''The Journal of Modern Korean Studies'' 3: 1-10. *Schmid, Andre. (1997). "Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Ch'aeho and the Politics of Territorial History in Korea." ''Journal of Asian Studies'' 56.1: 26-46. *Schmid, Andre. (2002).
Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919
'. New York: Columbia University Press. *Xu, Stella Yingzi. (2007). "That glorious ancient history of our nation: The contested re-readings of 'Korea' in early Chinese historical records and their legacy in the formation of Korean-ness." PhD dissertation, Department of East Asian Languages and Culture,

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

. 1908 non-fiction books Historiography of Korea History of Korea History books about Korea Shin Chaeho