Theoretical Framework In Paul Cohen's History In Three Key
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Theoretical Framework
Cohen’s Three Keys
In Paul Cohen’s, History in three keys, there is an underlying focus on the purpose and intention of a historical narrative. History in three keys provided a framework that explicitly grapples with events of the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900) - an uprising against national contamination in the form of foreign missionaries, soldiers, diplomats as well as native Christians and enemies real of imagined. As its title suggests, Cohen’s presented the argument that history can be dichotomized into three aspects - history as event, experience and myth.
History as an event is defined as the “historically reconstructed past,” and the concise narration of the events of the Boxer Rebellion that follows is intended to illustrate the historian’s most familiar role as omniscient storyteller. The factual chronology of attacks, counter-attacks, and massacres (Boxer, non-Boxer Chinese, and foreign) is interwoven with commentary intended to…show more content… Such an example would be Iris Chang’s “Rape of nanking” that has been criticised for excluding and cherry-picking information in order to make an argument more appealing to the intended audience is an apparent factor for the mythologization in history.
"Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests," she writes. "An estimated 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced . . . So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were