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Article: History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Paul A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xviii plus 428pp. $34.50).
This long-awaited book on the Boxer Uprising is a critical inquiry into the different ways in which we understand the past. Cohen seeks to distinguish the historian's reconstruction of the event from the participants' experience on the one hand, and from the myths of polemicists on the other. Although the 18991900 anti-foreign uprising in North China is his example, Cohen's book is as much about the nature of history as it is a study of collective action in China.
The first part of the book summarizes the Boxers as event. This is the past reconstructed by historians, and ...