When does historical work 'get started' on newer topics/people? It seems like Obama is going to have a fairly decent amount of historical consideration, and may be Bill Gates, possibly Tesla/Musk too or at least the people associated with the "Mars race." It seems like the rise of the smart phone would be something future historians might look into, too.
Are there currently 'historians' working on cataloguing everything things these to be studied later down the road? Is that even allowed for somebody who's considered a "historian" to begin working on somebody or something who/that's still 'making' history? Or is there just some point where stuff gets moved from the realm of promoters/PR people to actual historians with real degrees?
Could a freshly graduated history major choose to start working on Obama or Smartphones or whatever else, knowing that it'll eventually have some historical merit in the coming decades?
The division between social sciences is always iffy, especially when defining it by topic.I've found it to be an impractical dividing factor. Historians, archaeologists, sociologists, and plolitical scientists can all the study the US Civil War, maybe even the same battle. But what sets them apart is their approach. A historian may spend his time in the archives reading field journals and newspapers. An archaeologist might excavate a battlefcampfieldee if the pphysical remains back up an exaggerated report. A sociologist may use enlistment records to study who made up each army. It's not what they study, but how.
How does this apply here? We often get a similar question about archaeology, which has a more graspable answer. There's no definitive point at which archaeology stops, but y there's a point at which studying people based on their physical remains becomes impractical. I'm not going to excavate a vacated apartment to see who lived there, I'm going to ask the neighbor. Some might conaider forensics an archaeology of very recent events. The same can be said of history. You could technically write a history of the smart phone, looking through primary sources like Best Buy catalogues. But... why? Material so recent is either avaiable to the public or best left to other people. Recording how people use smartphones and interviwieng them about their experience is not part of historical method, it's more sociology or anthropology. Describing an event in the current campaign race is for political scientists and journalists. There are certainly people who are stidying and wiritng about the things you described, but they aren't historians. A historian's toolbox is not equipped for things which are "history" only by technically w that yesterday is history too.