In January 2004, I traveled to Minneapolis to visit the special collections at the University of Minnesota's main campus, where the majority of the papers associated with the vast American aid project between that university and Seoul National University (1954–1962) are housed, an effort administered through the International Cooperation Administration, one of the predecessors to USAID. One of the archivists informed me that the papers had gone untouched for nearly a decade, the previous party of researchers having consisted of a group of South Korean graduate students assembling materials in the mid-1990s, just prior to their university's fiftieth anniversary celebration. Although it would be several years before I learned that one of these students was Park Tae Gyun, now a professor of international studies at Seoul National University, I might have expected as much, as this kind of relentless quest for research materials, particularly new documents involving the diverse international actors who helped to transform the peninsula after 1945, characterizes both of the projects under review here.
