OK so this question is slightly open ended, but I am interested in what are the current major trends in academic history.
The 20th century saw numerous trends, from social history, the history of marginalised peoples, the study of long trends (annales), microhistory, greater focus on non-western history, and no doubt lots of other things which as a layperson I am unaware of.
What has been happening in the 21st century so far?
What areas of history are only just being explored?
Are there any new approaches to studying history?
Have their been influential changes in our perspective and understanding of important, well researched historical questions?
So I can't comment on some of this because I think it partly violates he subreddit rules (Mods, I apologize if I am violating it as well), but I can comment on one aspect when it comes to the newest approaches of studying history.
Research databases have change the way historians gather information and conduct research. Programs, like JSTOR and ProQuest allow historians to search seemingly endless supplies of information in a rather rapid fashion. ProQuest in particular allows researchers to be able to search every article ever published by news papers, like the New York Times and pull up that article on any computer. It's amazing really.
My area of expertise is Early Christianity and it's spread over the first 400 years. One manuscript that is particularly interesting is one called the Codex Sinaiticus Which dates back to the mid to early 300s and is the oldest "complete" bible we have in existence today. I myself have been able to study parts of it through the link I provided above, which shows scans of this primary document which was put together by the British Library. Examining a document like this would not have been possible 20 years ago because the technology did not exist. Either copies would have been made and published in books, or some select historians would have the privilege of examine it first hand. Lowly graduate students like myself would never have had that honor.
It's a pretty exciting time to study history.
In African-American history, the history itself is becoming localized. Rather than looking at the narrative of Brown V. Board > MLK > 1964 Civil Rights Act > Death of King/Death of "Civil Rights Movement" as it has been traditionally understood, looking from a top down lens, the history is instead looking from the bottom up.
County and state histories of the local Civil Rights Movement, biographies of important (yet local) leaders, resistance movements and separate pieces of the Civil Rights Movement are being dissected on a much larger scale. Given that the field itself only dates back to the 1960s, these are tremendous leaps and bounds in scholarship and understanding of African-American history. My work for example has been on the Civil Rights Movement in one single county in South Carolina from 1865 to 1970, tracing it from the Civil War to an understudied race riot. In addition to this, comparative scholarship between Women's, Latino, and LGBT Civil Rights Movements are also growing as a whole, sub-altern history is very much in vogue. The field is developing in such a way that scholarship is exploding (and its damn hard to keep up honestly) and its wonderful.
One example you might look at is Somebody Had to Do It detailing School Desegregation on its own, and lending an important oral history component to it.