Bruce Cumings

Bruce Cumings (born September 5, 1943) is an American historian of East Asia, professor, lecturer, and author. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History and the former history department chair at the University of Chicago. He specializes in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations. In May 2007, Cumings was the first recipient of the Kim Dae-Jung Academic Award for Outstanding Achievements and Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights, and Peace granted by South Korea. 

The award is named in honor of the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung. The award recognizes Cumings for his "outstanding scholarship and engaged public activity regarding human rights and democratization during the decades of dictatorship in Korea and after the dictatorship ended in 1987." Cumings' Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1 (1980) won the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and his Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2 (1991) won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association.

Cummings was born in Rochester, New York, on September 5, 1943. He was raised in Iowa and Ohio, where his father, Edgar C. Cumings, was a college administrator. He worked summers for five years, three of them at the Republic Steel plant in Cleveland, to put himself through Denison University, with further help from a baseball scholarship. He graduated with a degree in psychology in 1965, then served in the Peace Corps in Korea from 1967–68 before taking an M.A. at Indiana University. 

He then earned a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1975. He taught at Swarthmore College, the University of Washington, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is married to Meredith Jung-En Woo, the president of Sweet Briar College and former Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. 

They had two sons; additionally, Cumings had a daughter from his first marriage. Cummings joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars at Columbia after Mark Selden formed a chapter there and published extensively in its journal, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, where his writings ranged from the early history of the Korean resistance movement against Japan to the intertwining of US academia with US intelligence agencies. 

His research focuses on 20th-century international history, the United States and East Asia relations, East Asian political economy, modern Korean history, and American foreign relations. He is interested in the "multiplicity of ways that conceptions, metaphors, and discourses are related to political economy and material forms of production" and relations between "East and West."

Cumings' scholarship has gone deeper than any other writing in English with respect to the circumstances of the Korean War outbreak[citation needed], and pre-1990 documents allowed him to draw lines of culpability of various actors for the tragedy of the Korean War. Cumings wrote: The Korean War did not begin on June 25, 1950, with much special pleading and argument to the contrary. 

If it did not begin then, Kim II Sung could not have "started" it then, but only at some earlier point. As we search backward for that point, we slowly grope toward the truth that civil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes, with blame enough to go around for everyone—and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it. 

How many Koreans might still be alive had that not happened? Blame enough to include the Soviet Union, likewise unconcerned with Korea's ancient integrity and determined to "build socialism" whether Koreans wanted their kind of system or not. How many Koreans might still be alive had that not happened? And then, as we peer inside Korea to inquire about Korean actions that might have avoided national division and fratricidal conflict, we get a long list indeed.

Cummings has not confined himself purely to the study of modern Korea but has written broadly about East Asia and even books about the expansion of the American West. He wrote Industrial Behemoth: The Northeast Asian Political Economy in the 20th Century, which seeks to understand the industrialization of Japan, both Koreas, Taiwan, and parts of China, and the ways that scholars and political leaders have viewed that development.

Cumings wrote in his book North Korea: Another Country: "I have no sympathy for the North, which is the author of most of its own troubles," but he alludes to the "significant responsibility that all Americans share for the garrison state that emerged on the ashes of our truly terrible destruction of the North half a century ago."

In a talk given at the University of Chicago in 2003, Cumings declared that the US had "occupied" South Korea for 58 years. In 1945, he explained that the Chinese and Soviets had armies north of Korea and that the Americans had an army south. The Soviets withdrew in 1948, followed by the Chinese in 1958, but US troops remained in South Korea, and in the event of war, the US commander would control the South Korean Army. He disputed that North Korea cheated on the October 1994 Agreed Framework.