History and Culture
Learn more about the history and culture of go here. Start with our brief history of go, continuing on this page and then see our Scholarly Research page for in-depth and highly researched details on the history and culture of go. You can also find quite a few books on History and Culture of go with our detailed listing of books.
The American Go Association 1995 Historical Book. "Go Stones" aka "milestones" of Go in the United States as well as detailed information on the AGA officers and championships held in the United States. Well worth reading, if not only for the "Do Not Copy" warning. Compiled and edited by Craig Hutchinson with assistance from Phil Straus, Barbara Calhoun, Terry Benson, Robert McCallister, Roy Laird, Roger White, Kris Kirschner, George Chernowitz, Alva Jenkins, Louise Ingram, and Dianne Cartledge.
The IGS Art Gallery: Learn more about go as a rich cultural presence in Asian life through more than 100 Japanese and Chinese classic works of art featuring a go theme, fully curated with the history and significance of each piece.
New In Go: A collection of more than 80 articles on a wide range of offbeat subjects -- everything from a six-group seki to how people without arms play go. Written and compiled by John Fairbairn and T. Mark Hall, the authors of the GoGoD Encyclopedia and Database.
History of Go: Links to pages on gobase.org describing the role of go in Chinese, Japanese and Korean society through the ages.
Tales from Go History: Anecdotes involving Iwamoto, Albert Einstein and others.
Our Go In Print page contains a plethora of books on the culture, history, and literature of go.
Rules of Go: Many people find interesting historical context in the rules of go. They take particular interest in how they've been documented (both directly and indirectly) and how they've changed over the centuries. Our page of information on the rules of go contains a complete set of links to rule-related information and commentary.
Sensei's Library: A huge, communally maintained archive of nearly 3000 pages on every conceivable go-related topic.
Pictorial History of Go from the Babelstone blog.
AGA Archives (broken link): The American Go Association maintains one of the most extensive collections of Western go materials in the world.
The AGA Archive: Thousands of historical documents pertaining to American go, and many other related subjects. There is also an extensive collection of Japanese material.
Go in America: This history of American go was presented to the First International Conference on Baduk in Seoul, Korea in 2001, and published in the proceedings of that conference.