From Colony to Independence: How Missionaries Influenced American Perceptions of Korea

In the first half of the 20th century, much of what Americans knew about Korea came from missionaries.  Missionaries were the Americans who could claim the longest institutional knowledge about Korea:  from the final days of the last dynasty, through Japanese colonialism, and independence as a divided nation.  The government, media, and foreign policy elites looked to missionaries for information and sometimes missionaries and their children became the very knowledge producers of Korea for academic and political institutions.  But missionaries were often in conflict with their own mission boards about what their role should be in the host country and how much they should get involved in local politics.  Missionaries had to walk a fine line between protecting their own religious goals, navigating regional political turmoil, and interjecting into U.S. policy objectives.  In balancing religious and political interests, missionaries engaged in discussions of foreign affairs and helped frame America’s understanding of Korea’s people, politics, and aspirations.  In this talk, I will discuss my research at missionary archives and my findings on the history of mission work in Korea and its intertwining with U.S. and Korean transnational relations. 

​Hannah Kim studies U.S. and Korean relations in the early to mid-twentieth century. Her book, Ties that Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905-1965 (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) examines how a transnational community of people such as missionaries, mission board members, academics, journalists, expatriates, adoptive parents, and government officials helped shape American perceptions of Korea and Koreans. Her article, “Death in Philadelphia, 1958: The Murder of In-Ho Oh and the Politics of Cold War America," won the Urban History Association's Arnold Hirsch Award for the best article in a scholarly journal and was a finalist for the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA's Robert W. Cherney Article Award. Professor Kim is also the co-coordinator of the History/Social Studies Education program at the University of Delaware.  She along with other faculty study and suggest strategies to recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups in teacher education.  Diversity in education remains a strong interest in Professor Kim's work in teacher preparation and with local K-12 schools.