Actually, I don't think many professional historians believe that phrase. The past can be "learned from," yes, as in to inform your perspective on it, the present, and the future. Do I think anything from the Sixties will happen again? No. But I do believe the momentum of politics, culture, and human nature more broadly always produces some interesting parallels. See the liberal turn/conservative reaction, quagmires in foreign wars, race as a central political element, etc. Same goes for the upheaval in the revolutions you mentioned. Thing is, though, it's hard to apply any lessons from Russia, France, or the Sixties-era US or any other time to today. Literally a different world.

I think Askhistorians is populated professional or aspiring historians who feel the same way. If the askers had similar credentials, it wouldn't be a problem. The fact is, if you let loaded political questions into the mix, comparing the past to the present really gums up the quality, informed output generated here.

Edit/TL;DR: Getting the historical perspective assumes the world doesn't really change. We are no better equipped to track contemporary developments as anyone else, and probably less so than many "insider" professions like journalism.

There are several things to comment on here. First, there are plenty of historians who comment on current events. One that I read sometimes is Juan Cole, a historian of the modern Middle East who has become a kind of journalist; another is Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a scholar of China who writes pieces in major news outlets all the time.

Another is that the "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" line is actually very rarely used by actual historians. It's not a useful way of looking at history.

A third point is that to the extent that historians do not comment on the present, there are two elements at work, one theoretical and one empirical. Theoretically speaking, history is at its core the study of change, and of the particular. Each historical time and place is unique, and there are no (specific) universals governing human societies. I'd argue that there are some very broad universals: every society defines membership, makes meaning, exercises or shares power, acts upon its environment, and changes over time. However, these universals are so broad that we cannot expect to see universal articulations of these things. So, because each historical situation is unique, a historian's first instinct when seeing contemporary events is to consider what is unique about them. There may be parallels, sure, but our view of history doesn't give us predictive powers. We don't look at a revolution in Egypt, for example, and say, "Whoa, be careful for that Robespierre!" Instead, we tend to look at how a current situation came into being; this is precisely what you'll find on someone like Juan Cole's blog. He'll look at a given conflict in the Middle East, and explain how the various actors have long histories of conflict dating back to the colonial period, which might have reoriented older sectarian or economic tensions, or whatever. We provide context and not predictions, is a way you could say it.

There's also a basic empirical problem for historians commenting on public events. Historians are, by and large, trained to work with archives of text which we can put into a temporal perspective. We're used to seeing a body of documents that reflect various viewpoints on a given topic, and then analyzing them to understand what happened, how, and why. This is extremely difficult for current events, because there's no real archive; what we have instead are media reports. And, while those can be examined with a critical eye as an archive of sorts, that's a different kind of endeavor from reading a collection of documents in an archive. It's not that media reports are "biased" (all human texts are subjective), but that it's not a format we're used to working with. As such, our skills just aren't always that applicable.

Contrast the historian's archival approach to journalism. What is a journalist's first priority? More often than not, it's to find people and ask them about things. They look to get interviews. Those can be very interesting sources in their own right, and some historians do that, but by and large historians are not trained to go and find in-the-know people to interview.

I think it's more in the interest of the limitations of an internet forum than an actual rule of historiography. I study the Zapatistas, who began their rebellion in 1994, so most of that work is all in the past twenty years. There are plenty of historians studying recent events.

On this subreddit, however, it's mostly non-historians asking the questions and anyone is free to answer. Being able to cover recent political history, for example, could lead to a very toxic comment section where there might be historians with interesting things to say, but they could be drowned out by a lot of people (flaired or not) giving very political answers. It seems to me like it was mainly just a moderation decision. Seeing as how I don't have to put any work in to moderate this place, I'm not about to complain.

As for actually current events, like the present Israeli invasion of Gaza or the plane that just went down of Ukrainian rebel territory, it's way too soon to have all of the information a historian would want to make an informed argument. I think that in policy and news discussions of these events, historians should be consulted for a better understanding of regional context, but you can see the limitations.

If you're interested in a historian's perspective on a question not allowed by the subreddit rules, you can always reach out to them via PM. There's a list of flaired users by subfield and many have indicated in their user profile pages that they're open to private messages. Personally, I've had people PM me to ask questions that weren't allowed by the rules and I think it's great to offer whatever information I can.

There are some historians who have endeavored to use history as a means of guiding policy. It can be done, but to be done responsibility it requires taking a very careful approach — knowing when something in the past is generalizable to other contexts and when it is not. The classic book on this topic is Ernest May's "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, and it is filled with examples of people invoking historical understanding completely inadequately and this leading them to making terrible conclusions about the right course of action, and proposing instead a more nuanced approach to the using of history for policy. It is less about "don't get into a land war in Asia" than it is "here are the kinds of factors that have often mattered in foreign policy and are easy to overlook."

Not all historians agree with May's approach; I think it is significant that he played out a lot of his career in a policy school, where this approach to history is more common than it is in straight History departments. It is also a warning, perhaps, that May's own approach to a major area of history — the Cuban Missile Crisis — is currently considered fairly out of date and many of the lessons he drew from the Crisis are now seen as somewhat incorrect. Still, May's approach is a pretty cautious and sober one, so much so that it's hard for his kind of approach to really give wrong recommendations because it doesn't really give very strong recommendations. In my view.

Note that this is separate from giving perspective on current events. Many historians do, in fact, do this. There are many high-end periodicals that carry such works, e.g. the New York Times editorial page, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, etc. It is just that being a good historian usually means recognizing how little one knows about any time, especially the present. So you have to be quite careful if you don't want to be overly simplistic or reductionist. History, unlike physics and biology, does not gain when it is reduced to the most basic of variables.

can notice parallels between, say, French revolution and Russian revolution

I know quite a bit about the Russian Revolution, and I'd like to refute by example, so to speak.

Robespierre was a central political voice of a group of people (who largely used him as a scapegoat) who were attempting to stabilize France with violence. Stalin hijacked a leaky, inefficient political process to establish himself as a dictator.

The French revolution came out of a poor fiscal policy, leading to an economy that hurt the peasants most, and was bolstered by Enlightenment ideals. Robespierre's faction came into their power through a coup by sensationalism. The Russian revolution was preceded by the 1905 revolution, itself affected by the extremely late abolition of serfdom and generally restrictive nature of the Empire, and then WWI; the climate resulted in Bloody Sunday, and the general revolt of the upper middle class, which then turned into an internal power struggle where it just so happened the Marxists (with a very different and not-so-democratic set of ideals) came out on top.

France remains a big ol' mess after the Revolution until the rise of Napoleon, an autocrat who managed to do alright by the French. Russia spends more than half a century with an even worse autocracy than before, which defined itself by a stillborn techno-military conflict with the United States.

History reaches back, and reaches forward. Superficial similarities between two disparate events are generally only superficial and not indicative off any grand truths of the universe. How similar are platypus and ducks? They both have bills, similar diets, and they both swim - but they have exceptionally different lifestyles and adaptations as part of a larger heritage with other mammals/birds, respectively.

If we want to learn from history, there is a need for a bigger picture. With current events, what we have is fallible recent accounts. There is secret, or simply hidden, information that we cannot currently access. There are many perspectives (notably poor, non-Western ones) that will not be recorded or reach us in translation for some time. And we don't know what effects these events will have in the vast and chaotic systems of human behavior. Current events can and should be discussed in the light of history, because they reach back, but historical methods require more information, and are not designed to reach forward.

How do you define historian?

Several of my friends from my cohorts in undergraduate and graduate school have found gainful employment at think tanks, government agencies, and as market research analysts for large international corporations. The last career in particular involves analyzing the possible repercussions of current events based on how similar events have played out in the past to protect the company's interests and profitability.

For the professional historian (the majority of which are university professors), speculation isn't their game. Their interests are in studying and interpreting the past, not the future. Not that historians won't talk at all about the importance of current events--it's just usually in a more informal setting (classroom discussion, non-peer reviewed articles, etc.) rather than an academic journal.

In terms of this subreddit in particular, I'm not a mod, but I imagine that the mods want to avoid the inevitable deluge of threads on "Flight 17" or "Israel-Palestine," for example. Discussing those events is difficult because so much is speculative, something this subreddit actively avoids. It's not that those of us who contribute to this subreddit aren't talking about it, but we're doing it over at worldnews instead.

Why historians stay away from historical analysis/interpretation of current events or policy making think tanks?

Hang on here: how do you assume the historian stays away from this? Has CNN or Fox or any other network asked historians, ie trained investigators of the past, to comment on current events? I'd bet most editors would rather be flayed alive on their own network than try to coerce an academic into a sound bite. The problem, I suggest, is the state of the medium, not the messenger.

The policy of this subreddit has nothing to do with the above. Being a flair I can say I've had plenty of conversations about current events with contemporaries from the sub, off the sub.

I think people have answered much better than I could ever hope to on the limits of applying the historical method to the present, mostly you can "prove" the benefits of any policy you want with historical examples if put forth even minor effort. But I'll talk about that magic number!

The twenty year rule is somewhat arbitrary and is unique to AskHistorians, it doesn't come from the academe and if you tell a non-AskHistorians user "whoa there, that's from 1996 we can't talk about it historically!" they'll think you're a loonytoon. We could have a ten year rule. We could have a thirty year rule. But twenty seems to be a decent enough cooling-off period for random internet people to be able to talk objectively (or at least calmly?) about political issues, so it works for us. We do bend it forward once in a while for a few things, at our discretion.

There's one point that I don't believe I've seen mentioned so far, and that's that governments, companies, and other organizations that practice some form of secrecy often classify relevant paperwork/documents/records, and when a historian doesn't have access to those things it can make it practically impossible to attain even a rudimentary understanding of an event or era. Add to that the bias that we all have towards current events (and if you don't think you're biased than you're definitely biased), and it becomes clear that a complete understanding is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve so soon after an event.

I just lurk because I enjoy the subreddit, but it's (mostly) thankfully missing the degeneration into politics that all other subreddits seem to become.

On occasion, I've even seen the people here refuse to get caught up in popular interpretation of history and insist that it be considered objectively. It's damned nice.

How long could that last if they were getting caught up in every jackassed political controversy that infests the current news?

Here's an example--the recent story that made headlines around world: "Bodies of 800 babies, long dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers.”

Except, whoops, there was a major correction: "No bodies have been found in a tank. The historian believes they are there based on her research. The Irish government is investigating."

The reason the 20 rule for this sub (and many many historical journals) exists, is to allow us to get distance from the events, to let more evidence accrue that we can read, and judge, and work with. It's not particularly possible to write a history of Obama's presidency while it is still happening. What if he got impeached tomorrow? That would be a very different story.

There are many who do in International Relations / Political Science and they most notably belong to what is referred to as the 'English School'. Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was fierce disagreement over methodology, culminating in what has come to be known as 'the Second Great Debate' of IR. Essentially, it was a debate between Traditionalists, i.e., those who favoured a historical, interpretive, legal approach to understanding IR and political phenomenon and Behaviouralists who focused exclusively on the behaviour of key actors in the political / international system.

So, you can absolutely find historical analysis / interpretation of current events and policy making, you're just looking in the "wrong" places.