Abstract
A guide to a subset of materials in the William Elliot Griffis Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey on Korean history and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
William Elliot Griffis, an accomplished teacher, author, scholar, and theologian, was one of the first thousand Americans to enter Meiji Japan. Born in 1843, he fought for the Union during the Civil War. Griffis graduated from Rutgers College in 1869, and shortly thereafter traveled to Japan to teach natural sciences and help organize education in provincial Echizen (later named Fukui), as part of the Japanese government’s broad Westernization/modernization project. Griffis remained in Japan for some three years between 1871 and 1874. Upon returning to the United States, he became one of the foremost Western authorities on American-Japanese relations. His work The Mikado’s Empire was the leading publication on Japan in the U.S. for several decades. Griffis was an avid reader and collector on all subjects that concerned the Far East, including Japan, China and Korea. Although Griffis did not travel to Korea until 1927, he was knowledgeable about the country’s culture and politics. He published several books, including Corea: The Hermit Nation, Corea, Within and Without, A Modern Pioneer in Korea, Korean Fairy Tales, and The Unmannerly Tiger and Other Korean Tales, in addition to many newspaper and magazine articles on Korea. He also collected a wealth of other articles, manuscripts, photographs and artifacts relating to Korea between 1874 and his death in 1928.
The William Elliot Griffis collection presents a unique opportunity to researchers, as the dates fall into the era of transition between the end of the Yi Dynasty (1392–1910) and the colonial stewardship by Japan (1910–1945). The late nineteenth century inaugurated the first wave of Western interest in the history of Korea. Griffis became an important interpreter of Korea to the West during this early period, as well as a collector of Korean materials. The Griffis collection includes books and articles on the removal of Queen Min, the Korean Independence movement, and numerous resources on Korea under Japanese rule. The Griffis collection is home to valuable resources that appeared before the Japanese takeover, and to many Western assessments of the Korean situation at that time. The Griffis collection also houses many photographs and articles from the late Yi period, which will prove valuable for research on traditional Korea.