What this made me think of was using satellites to map old Egyptian pyramids hidden under the sand. In the last decade we've discovered so much we never knew existed by using lasers to "see" what lies beneath. I imagine this will be used everywhere and open up so much about our history.

As someone going through a teaching credential program at the moment, from my perspective there is. I suppose it's nothing new what-so ever for academics, but the training high-school teachers currently receive, at least here in California, seems radically different that what I gather from my high school teachers about a decade ago.

For one, we're actually encouraged to teach more theory and methodology. This means that kids learn historiography, current practices, and most importantly, the short-shortsightedness of taking the narrative learned from their one text-book and one history teacher as a factual and complete account of events. Students are expected to craft arguments based on their own analysis of primary and secondary sources as they take a personal role in crafting their own interpretations. Coupled with common core standards, history classes are currently morphing to tackle general critical-thinking skill development.

New approaches towards narratives also arise. There's a stress on "new" world history that attempts to strip current methods of teaching from Westernized perspectives that have fled academia decades ago yet still persists in secondary schools. We're encouraged to teach this historiographic shift. Overall, the focus of world history is actually more global. Unlike text-book chapters in which students randomly jump from one location and time, there's more focus on the persistent interactions between cultures in Afroeurasia and the Americas through all of history, with an even larger focus on global interaction after the Columbian exchange.

Overall, students get exposed to academic history. They learn historiography, periodization, causality, and other aspects of what actual historians do. Anyways, I realize this isn't a historical frontier like the one you seek, but as any field, there's much we still don't know. I do think that they way people learn history however, makes an enormous impact on the present. The better one understand the position they were born into, the more agency they possess in altering that inherited circumstance.

You may be interested in our "What's New in History" weekly feature threads.

Oh my god, YES! The ways in which historians view the past has been consistently evolving for the last few decades at least. Historians have been re-examining the way we view such concepts as race, gender, imperialism, power, language, class, and many others over the past few decades (often referred to in aggregate as the "cultural turn"). One of my personal favorites is the rise of transnationalism as a field of historical study (it started perhaps a decade ago but is really picking up steam in the past few years). Transnationalism tries to complicate, but not disregard, the idea of the nation-state as a primary driver of history. This means that simply stating that there is an "American" history that is fully self-contained within the US and can be explained fully without looking beyond US borders, is incorrect and oversimplified. I'm not sure whether that will sound obvious to anyone here but in the writing of history, you'd be surprised how much the nation-state as a "vehicle" moving history forward has dominated both scholarly and public understandings of history. Transnationalism seeks to get into the various spaces which exist between nations while also connecting them. This involves networks of commerce, ideas, culture, people, and so on. One example is a fascinating study about how the California Gold Rush (typically viewed as a solely "American" event) completely transformed society in Panama.

There are also interesting innovations going on in antebellum American history, such as increasing focus on the Border States of Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia/West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware (named for the Border States of the Civil War). Throughout historical study there is an increasingly acknowledgement of what are called Borderlands, referring to geographic locations where people and cultures meet and mix. It's hard to say, for example, that Kentucky has nothing in common with Illinois or Indiana just because one's a southern state and the other's a northern state. Whereas previous studies have always talked about the North and South as a binary, I'm very excited to see how this new Borderlands research into these states (as well as, say, Tennessee or Ohio) complicates ideas of sectionalism and regional divides in antebellum history, especially since the regions in question fought a major war over their differences. I have no idea if the research will go this way, but if these studies lead to the establishment of a 3rd Borderlands region which existed between North and South, that would be extremely exciting for historians.

These are just examples. I'm sure any historian on this thread could name major innovations in research and interpretation for their respective fields, not to mention overarching methodologies like the rise of Digital Humanities.

Underwater archaeology.

Don't ask why it has taken so long, but considering humans like to live along shore lines and that water levels have risen since the last ice age, many of our earliest settlements are underwater just waiting to be discovered.

Oh, and Gobeleki Tepe.

Even though it's been around for 100+ years I think of archaeology as a young discipline. The archaeological record is huge and infinitely detailed, but also maddeningly patchy. There are only a few parts of the world that have been truly explored in depth, and even in those places there's always new types of data to collect and new ways to wring more information out of it. Trying to tackle that you have a relatively small, poorly funded discipline that hasn't really cracked how to make sense of their data yet (although definitely not through lack of trying). So there's always lots of new stuff on the horizon. Here's a very incomplete list, heavily biased towards my own interests and the limits of my knowledge:

• Hunter-gatherer complexity

  Part of the received of received wisdom in archaeology is that human beings spent most of our history living very simple lives hunting and gathering, until things started to get interesting in the last 10,000 years with the invention of farming. That's not exactly wrong – think of it more like "Newtonian prehistory" – but we keep finding more and more evidence of unexpected levels of complexity just before the invention of farming which is forcing us to reassess the timeline. It's widely accepted now that the evolution of social complexity was a much more-drawn out process than we thought, and has a much thornier relationship with food production technology. So now it's a race to an explanation for that.

• Big prehistoric sites

  Another part of that received wisdom is that prehistoric "village" settlements were a limited to a certain size, until they became "cities", which were a different type of settlement that could grow much bigger. There have always large sites that have been exceptions to this rule, but what's new is that we're a) becoming aware of sites that are really stretching this rule, in terms of their size and age; and b) connecting the dots and realising there are too many sites like this around the world to be dismissed as exceptions. You can't hand wave them as "proto-cities" because apart from their size, they don't have any of the features of cities, and many of them are thousands of years older than any bona fide cities appear in the same region. They're something different, and we don't understand how they work.

• Archaeology of the ex-USSR

  This isn't really "new" – Soviet archaeologists did fantastic work – but the archaeology of the ex-USSR has only recently been opened up to the rest of the world. There are a few pioneers from the West that have been working there since 1991 (and before), but for the most part it took a while to break down the institutional and language barriers. Early agricultural cultures in Eastern Europe, the prehistory of the steppe, urban civilisations in Central Asia, classical archaeology on the Black Sea and medieval archaeology in European Russia are all a lot more accessible now and are wide open for fresh perspectives. (As a side note, I think Soviet/ex-Soviet archaeological theory could contribute a lot to scholarship in the West, so it'd be great to also see ideas flowing in the other direction too, but alas it hasn't happened).

• Chinese archaeology

  Similarly, China has a rich and well-studied archaeological record but it's only starting to become well known in the West. Apart from being a fascinating prehistory in and of itself, China is a great point of comparison for west Eurasia – a lot of developments in the west occurred independently in the east, so there's a lot of promise there for comparing the parallels and the differences and testing comparative models.

• Amazonian prehistory

  As discussed elsewhere in this thread, new methods like LIDAR, geoarchaeology and spatial modelling has recently allowed us to penetrate the prehistory of the Amazon – which for obvious reasons is not the easiest region to study using traditional, ground-based archaeological methods. Contrary to its image as a sparsely populated, pristine wilderness, we know now that the Amazon has a long prehistory and was thickly populated with towns, villages, roads and monuments. This feeds into a broader new appreciation by archaeologists and historians that the Americas were very, very different before 1492.

• Ancient DNA

  We can now reliably extract DNA from ancient animal and human bones and sequence their whole genome. The amount of new information there is enormous. We can use it to talk about human evolution where before we only had fossils. We can use it to talk about plant an animal domestication where before we only had seeds and bones. We can use it to talk about prehistoric population movements where before we only had pots.

I'm going to leave it there because I'm out of time and this is excessively long, but there's tons more things on the cutting edge I could talk about. Archaeology is a great field to be in right now.

Considering the shift from (the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of) Rankean historicism to more relativist and constructivist mode of historical thought took at least 100 years, and some of the vestiges of Rankean thought are still everpresent among historians - one must be aware that "cutting edge" is a relative concept in history.

For example, narrativism is still at the forefront of the philosophy of history, and it has been since the seventies and early eighties when philosophers of history like Mink, White and Ankersmit started thinking of history in terms of fictional(ized) narratives. Recently (that is: since the mid-naughties) some philosophers of history have been turning towards historical experience as a different mode of understanding the past. Dutch philosophers of history like Eelco Runia and (again) Frank Ankersmit are examples of this "cutting edge" school of thought.

At least from my surroundings, I see historians become more interested in methodology. Which is good. Too many historians still believe in Scissor and Paste history. E.g. that if the "primary source" says something, it must be true. Because it's a "primary source".

I'm not a historian, but interested in the subject. Some of the most interesting, cutting-edge work I've seen from my scientific vantage, is all the work on both genetic and linguistic phylogenies that are coming into alignment. It just seems like a lot of very new kinds of data are coming in that can help settle some old disputes, reveal new things we weren't aware of before, and ignite simmering debates that haven't come to the surface yet.

As PhD student in literature, one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet that is a SUPER interesting and brand-spanking-new discipline is "Publication History". This is the academic study of how books were disseminated and who they were read by, with little focus on the actual content of the text itself. These scholars dig through archival sources to find out the readership levels and demographics for various texts, how the texts were printed and what materials were used, and how books were shipped/sold to others.

I did some work along these lines during my MA, when I took a graduate class that analyzed early 18th century Subscription Lists. Due to the cost of mass-printing a book at the time, authors would go out and solicit people to pay for the book in advance by selling them on the concept/content before it was published. Once it was published, they'd include a "subscription list" at the front of the book that listed the names of people who purchased books in advance and how many copies they ordered. It was exactly like the Kickstarter website that people have flaunted as being so revolutionary to content creation, and it was fascinating to try and find out about the lives of people who ordered a particular book and speculate on their reasons for getting it.

Publication history is really good at imposing a little bit of historical context on literary studies, such as revealing that a lot of key Western intellectual texts had an extremely limited readership at their time of publication, as well as digging up whole new genres and histories that we might otherwise have forgotten about. A good friend of mine right now is becoming a really notable academic expert on the history of Canadian comic books by focusing on publication histories, and is receiving all sorts of government funding and job offers as a result. It's a really cool discipline and i'm excited to see where it goes!

Is it possible OP meant cutting edge in terms of Theory? Such as how Marxism might have been viewed in the 19th century.

Using computers to analyse large amounts of data, here's a phdcomics video that explains it quite a bit better than I can http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1628

Pornography! And the study of it! There's only a few people in my field, and most of the research started in the late 80's and really got going in the late 90s. Only started establishing itself in the past few years. I believe there's a journal in the works.

As a history student at one of the US's top research universities, cutting edge history right now often is trying to take newer methodologies useful for the discipline and apply them to older problems to shed new light on them. For instance, de Vries' The Industrious Revolution takes a look at an old problem (how did industrialization begin? and why?) and uses methodologies of economic theory and socialization theory combined with a classic sensitivity for old methods (primary sourcing, historical narrative, etc.).

The trendy rejection of either frameworks as a whole (think deconstructionism) has been largely banished, at least where I am. The common argument you'll hear is that all useful history is essentially counter-factual, in that you're constructing causal relationships. If you say x caused y, or was important in causing y, you're essentially saying that without x y would not have happened, or might not have happened, respectively. Most historians have accepted it as the cost of doing business so to speak, and have moved on to using useful methods pioneered in the 60's through 90's in a classic historical framework.

Of course new scientific advancements are also very cool as well. Historians are trying to move from being stodgy dudes with lots of books to people that can reach out to many different areas and bring in their respective methods. A good historian now doesn't just know several languages and research methodologies, but can communicate and utilize information from many other disciplines.

If the original poster of this question wasn't talking about theory, I would say that the cutting edge of history is fighting it out on the front lines - archives. Special collections, government archives, and other repositories are a kind of front lines for history studies and for things previously not known before. While it might be boring at times, occasionally you might find collections of items to help establish new arguments that alter our understanding of the past, or you might find lost documents such as Haiti's declaration of independence.

As for theory and the like, from the perspective of someone engaged in studying historical piracy, in particular the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, there appears to be a new wave of historians coming. These new contenders are actively "kicking the tires" and "looking for cracks in the old foundations" of pirate history. They are finding quite a bit of concerning issues too. We are realizing that even scholarly historians have fallen prey to romanticism and included myth as fact in their work just because it's what has been done before, sounds good, or just lazy work. Overall, this work is taking to task the "radical pirate" school of thought with pirate history that has it's primary start in the 1980s. The ideas that pirates of this era had crews with high levels of democracy, equality among race/gender, and were purposely rebelling against the capitalist system are receiving great reform. To say the least, re-examination of old evidence and finding new evidence is showing that pirate crews were not as democratic as previously thought, race was not equal on plenty of occasions in pirate crew, women pirates is so episodic that the two known examples in that era are the exceptions that it demonstrate how the maritime world (especially pirates) was a masculine domain, and that the political aspirations of pirates is far more complex than being pre-19th century Marxists.

I'm not a historian, but I'm working on some projects that utilize computational methodologies. You can find some projects here: [http://dhcommons.org/projects] I wrote an essay for a digital humanities course evaluating methods of digitizing large copora of newsprint. The project I examined in detail was an interdisciplinary effort to track reception of Lincoln's assassination and other important historical events by area. The project did so in Texas, and provided an interactive map and chunks of text from those areas and newspapers. The goal of the project was to provide a kind of bottom-up approach to studying events. It was really cool, and also helped create a corpus of text that was otherwise sitting in storage.

Just a point of thought, but I wonder about the value of studying events from really anytime after the 1970's under 'history.' I don't think we're far enough removed from these events and their influence to be able to make a historical analysis of them. Not that there aren't insights to be gleaned from studying these periods, just that they might be better served under the auspices of sociology or economics, rather than history. Obviously it's a vague concept, but it seems to me like the recent-ish trend of writing biographies of people still in their primes. As Solon would agree, you can't judge a man's life until it's over.

For me there are a few:

1. I think Howard Zinn really pioneered a new era in history where people are focusing more on being candid about what really happened and offering a bit of opinion on it. Ron Chernow's critique of Washington as a slave owner or Ellis's critique of Jefferson for the same reasons come to mind. Historians are looking at a larger picture now, and are less biased.

2. Reconsiderations. I see new history books with the title "So-So reconsidered" or "Reconsidering So-so" all the time. I think it's pretty popular and I enjoy it.

3. the way we teach history I think is changing. Teachers are doing more to bring the subject matter to life.

4. Examinations on social history have emerged a lot more in recent times. People are interested in every day people and how they molded the world.