ABSTRACT
In History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (Columbia University Press, 1997), in an effort to present a clearer picture of what exactly historians do when they write history, I examine the distinctive characteristics of the three ways of apprehending or “knowing” the past indicated in the book’s subtitle. To ground the theoretical argument I focus on a single – and in many ways highly singular – historical episode, the Boxer movement and uprising of 1898-1900. The theoretical side of the book is discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. What I would like to dwell on here is how my treatment of the Boxer episode differs from the approaches Chinese historians have tended to follow.1
