3 · 1운동사 연구의 최근 동향과 방향성

Examined in this article are historical studies -individual academic worksdedicated to the subject of the March 1st movement, and have been announced by Korean history scholars since the year 1990 through summer of 2018. The objective is to assess certain trends featured in those studies, and where such trends are apparently heading. For the past three decades, the academic circle’s study of the March 1st movement shifted its focus of examination from the movement’s own meaning as an actual event as well as its popularity gauged by the number of people who joined it, to how the spirit of the movement should be inherited to our descendants or succeeded by future generations, and to the issue of appropriate remembering, commemoration and appreciation of the movement’s own symbolic nature. Studies of the March 1st movement’s memories and its general images also show some internal diversities, as those from the historical society have been trying to determine how collective memories exist, operate and lead to honoring and commemorating, or define the collective memories’ relationship with individual policy stances or agendas of political/social factions, while those from the literature society or cultural/conceptual history scholars have been putting efforts in visualizing how certain symbolic images were created and fluctuated in the individuals’ consciousness or their everyday life, and to reveal certain social climate and trends of the time through them. These trends were no one-time impulse interests, and were actually the results of many historians’ painful efforts to properly honor and remember the March 1st movement, and to resolve some problems the March 1st movement studies have been facing recently. Thanks to such efforts we are now equipped with better, diverse, and more comprehensive understanding of the movement. New historical resources were identified and then tapped into, and people’s accessibility to such resources was significantly increased through publication of various manuals and digitalized sources. Advances made in either developing or managing historial data, new historial theories and methodologies recently devised, and the expansion in perspectives and viewpoints, have all contributed to the accomplishments examined in this article.