Making the Past Present
By Andy Urban, PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty
“Still Present Pasts,” open at the Intermedia Arts gallery and sponsored in part by the University’s Institute for Advanced Study, takes on the problematic legacy of the Korean War. In the United States the Korean War’s legacy for many is that of a “forgotten” war. Although nearly as many American soldiers died during the conflict on the Korean peninsula as they would in the following decades in Vietnam, because of the ambivalent outcome of the war, it largely faded from American memory. For the Korean population, which suffered an enormous toll from the war, it impacted their lives in almost every conceivable manner.