Abstract
During his career as a scholar of China, Paul A. Cohen has written insightful books on the way the past is analyzed and remembered by historians and laypersons: Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (2008) and the brilliant History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997). His new study elaborates further on these themes, bringing to bear Cohen’s sensitivity as a historian. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis is a book about storytelling, about the stories people tell themselves about their past in order to give meaning to their life. “The power of story,” writes Cohen, “so common and yet so poorly understood, merits far more scrutiny than it has generally received from historians” (xiii). Following the zeitgeist of memory studies, he is interested not in what happened, but in what people believed took place in the past: because we remember the past not in order to get it right but in order to get it wrong, and to make sense of our life in the present. These are stories full of repressions, mistakes, embellishments, and lies, a lot of lies.
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