List of ambassadors of the United States to South Korea
At the end of World War II, American forces accepted Imperial Japan's surrender in southern Korea, and Soviet forces accepted the surrender of the Japanese in northern Korea. Talks to agree upon a unity government for Korea failed and in 1948, two separate Korean states were created: the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). The United States established diplomatic relations with the new South Korean government, but did not recognize North Korea. Other countries, like the Soviet Union, recognized the Pyongyang government in North Korea, but did not initially establish relations with the South Korean government in Seoul.
Korean nationalist historiography
The surrender of Japan at the end of World War II handed Korea its independence, but the peninsula was immediately divided into ideologically opposed regimes in North and South Korea. At first, Marxist historians focusing on class analysis dominated historical writing in the north, whereas Syngman Rhee's staunchly anti-Communist government (1948–1960) also made the notion of "minjok" less central to historiography in the south. In North Korea class analysis was displaced by nationalist analysis in the 1950s, soon after the Korean War. In South Korea, the fall of the Rhee regime in 1960 and the anti-Japan protests triggered by the normalization of diplomatic ties with Japan in 1965 also reinstated the "minjok" as a "unifying framework" for developing an anti-colonial historiography. Since then, historical studies in both North and South have displayed a "pervasive and intense nationalistic tone" despite ideological differences between the two countries. This shared historical outlook has served as a backdrop to North Korea–South Korea relations, as in June 2000 when both Korean heads of state stated that Korean unification was a historical imperative.