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'Digital textbook' on Korean War to debut in U.S. in November

By Shin Ji-hye

Published : July 25, 2015 - 10:16

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A "digital textbook" on the Korean War will be unveiled at a national teachers' conference in the United States in November as part of efforts to raise awareness of what is often dubbed the "forgotten war," the project organizer said Friday.The Korean War Legacy Foundation has been working on the project to help American middle and high school students learn more about the war, in which more than 36,000 U.S. troops were killed, as regular history textbooks pay too little attention to it.

"We plan to unveil the digital textbook at a meeting of the National Council for Social Studies to be held in November," said Han Jong-woo, a professor at Syracuse University in New York, who heads the legacy foundation.

The professor said that the coverage of the Korean War in U.S. high school history textbooks is only about 30 percent of that of the Vietnam War and, in many cases, it is dealt with in just one sentence or two.

The "digital textbook" will be composed mainly of interviews with about 700 American veterans of the Korean War as well as photos, letters and other materials related to the war that the foundation has collected since 2011 under the sponsorship of South Korea's veterans affairs ministry and PNS Networks.

U.S. history teachers have also participated in the project, helping transcribe the interviews and inputting other data, he said. (Yonhap)