evidence: Sixty years ago North and South Korea ended the "Korean Conflict" by agreeing to the Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State. The agreement—a cease-fire, not a peace treaty—called for the Korean peninsula to be divided by a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) and a buffer, the demilitarized zone (DMZ), whose function would be to "prevent the occurrence of incidents which might lead to a resumption of hostilities." [...] Although it approximates the positions held by communist and U.S.-led U.N. forces for most of the last two-thirds of the war, the MDL is not the same line that had divided Korea before North invaded South in June, 1950. That line was the 38th parallel, whose origins as modern Korea's first intra-national boundary can be traced back to the final hours of World War II, when officials from the U.S. War and State Departments were preparing to negotiate with the Soviet Union over how Japanese-occupied Korea would be administered following Japan's surrender.