ABSTRACT
Philosophers have written lengthy theoretical treatises on what historians do. In my book History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997), as a practicing historian I explore the issue through an actual historical case, the Boxer uprising in China at the turn of the twentieth century. When I first began to study history, my idea of what historians “did” was very different from what it is now. I used to think of the past as, in some sense, a fixed body of factual material which it was the historian’s job to unearth and elucidate. I still think of the historian as a person whose main object is to understand and explain the past. But I now have a far less innocent view of the processes – and problems – involved. I now see the reconstructive work of the historian as in constant tension with two other ways of “knowing” the past – experience and myth – that, in terms of their bearing on people’s lives, are far more pervasive and influential.
