Big Brother, Little Brother: The American Influence on Korean Culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson Years

Big Brother, Little Brother is the first serious attempt to analyze the impact of American culture on an East Asian nation. Sang-Dawn Lee’s concise cultural history describes how US political and military hegemony over South Korea fostered Korean interest, and often veneration, of the American way of life. Focusing on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1968), the book traces the evolution of US views of Korea, Korean views of the US, and America’s impact on Korean thought, popular culture, everyday life and women’s rights. It charts the emergence - in the late 1960s - of a new Korean nationalism born out of a growing understanding that the US was not the wholly dependable big brother South Korea had sought.