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

history of Korea The Lower Paleolithic era on the Korean Peninsula and in 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 earl ...

from the time of the mythical

Dangun Dangun or Tangun (; ), also known as Dangun Wanggeom (; ), was the legendary founder and first king of Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom. He founded the first kingdom around the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. He is said to be the "gra ...

to the fall of the kingdom of

Balhae Balhae,, , ) also rendered as Bohai or Bohea, and called Jin (; ) early on, was a multiethnic kingdom established in 698 by Dae Joyeong (Da Zuorong). It was originally known as the Kingdom of Jin (震, Zhen) until 713 when its name was changed ...

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

independence Independence is a condition of a 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 status of ...

activist Shin Chaeho (1880–1936)––first published it as a series of articles in '' 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, and is variously described as a tradition, philosophy, religion, theory of government, or way of life. Founded by Confucius ...

histories that focused on the rise and fall of dynasties as well as the Japanese Pan-Asianist 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 t ...

" race. Influenced by

Social Darwinism Charles Darwin, after whom social Darwinism is named Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economi ...

, 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 period. The ''yangban'' were mainly composed of highly educated civil officials and military officers—landed or unlanded aristocrats wh ...

'' of the

Joseon Dynasty Joseon ( ; ; also romanized as ''Chosun''), officially Great Joseon (), was a dynastic kingdom of Korea that existed for 505 years. It was founded by Taejo of Joseon in July 1392 and replaced by the Korean Empire in October 1897. The kingdom w ...

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

Korean ethnic nationalism Korean nationalism can be viewed in two different contexts. One encompasses various movements throughout history to maintain a Korean cultural identity, history, and ethnicity (or "race"). This ethnic nationalism was mainly forged in opposition ...

and it laid the foundation for Korean nationalist historiography, which used the study of ancient Korea to resist Japanese colonial 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, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

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