The Transition to the “New Historiographical Style” (新史體) in Modern Korea: Compilation of Korean History Textbooks (1895–1910)

This article questions the prevailing scholarly tendency to conceptualize the New Historiographical Style (新史體) merely as the counterpart to the annalistic style (編年體). Rather than viewing the New Historiographical Style as a simple departure from the annalistic style, this article examines it as a comprehensive transformation toward a new historiographical framework, realized through the medium of Korean history textbooks in Korea’s transition to modernity. To this end, this article identifies three major dimensions of change in the historiographical framework of Korean history textbooks that can be understood as constituting the New Historiographical Style. First, the shift toward vernacular Korean in historical writing reflected an awareness of the need to produce historical knowledge accessible not only to intellectual elites but also to the general public. Second, the reorganization of content into a part-chapter-section structure (篇･編-章-節) aimed to select material suitable for “history written for teaching,” while simultaneously seeking to reduce the overall volume of content. Third, the move toward establishing a comprehensive national history that centered on contemporary history was accompanied by a present-centered objective: the cultivation of national subjects equipped with a consciousness of their own national history. Based on these findings, the historiographical significance of the New Historiographical Style can be summarized as follows. In Korea’s transition to modernity, the transformation of Korean historical writing through textbook compilation was driven by the necessity of disseminating knowledge of national history beyond intellectual elites to the broader population. This, in turn, reflected the pressing socio-political demands of the time, in which the formation of a “nation” capable of strengthening the state and safeguarding or restoring national sovereignty became an urgent task amid a crisis threatening the very survival of the state. Accordingly, the transition to the New Historiographical Style should not be understood as a discontinuous rupture confined solely to the realm of historical writing. Rather, it was a continuous process in which historical writing was reorganized through close interaction with school education, mediated by the compilation of textbooks.