Some context:
I understand the subreddit uses the 20 year mark, and I'm on board with that.
The first 'required' course in my undergrad history program is HIST 200, Introduction to Historical Interpretation. These classes are unique, so one HIST 200 class might focus on gender in Elizabethan-era England and another on US immigration in the 19th century or the historiography of visual artifacts.
Mine was on the 2003 Iraq War (taught in Spring 2011). Now, we acknowledged that we were breaking history's first rule, it was in the syllabus itself:
This course is an introduction to learning the skills of historians, finding and evaluating primary sources, analyzing second sources, developing an argument and debating the merits of contrasting arguments. The content of the course is U.S. History, 2001 to 2008, with major primary sources consisting of documentary films about this period in U.S. history. Usually historians allow journalists, filmmakers, and social scientists about forty years to produce a first draft of history before they have enough perspective to try their hand. This class will violate that rule and will seek its own first drafts, attempting answers to such questions as Why did the U.S. believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction? Why were relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina so botched? and what caused the Great Recession of 2008? Among the documentary films shown in class will be “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Inside Job.”
I always felt weird that this class counted towards a history degree. There are a couple of other courses in the catalog over the past decade that have also covered post 9/11 events in detail, with the most recent event I see in the syllabus being the Arab Spring.
Now I'm doing my masters in international relations, but I'm taking a crosslisted course which integrates IR and history students both at the UG and Grad level. We started on the foreign policy of McKinley and just left off at the end of George W. Bush's second term. Two different institutions, both seem to be at the bleeding edge of contemporary events... but can we say I'm studying history at this point?
Thoughts?
German history student from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (Germany) here- It's pretty random I would say sometimes there are classes who say history when it's 100 to 20 years ago, but there are some who talk about the actual financial crisis in Europe as a historical event. I think it depends on your point of view and your subject. Warhistorians would probably end with the cold war or 9/11, economic historians end with the financial crisis, political historians with 9/11 or the Arabian Spring, medical historians end with Sars, H1N1 or even the actual ebola epedemic.
We have several popular courses that deal with the Iraq War and even oral history involving that war (as well as other conflicts, some extending right up to now). So institutionally, we don't have a line--the past is active and alive in the present, and students get to encounter that history as the narrative is forming. I tend to stop the formal itinerary at 2000, out of convenience more than anything else. But we always end up in the Modern Africa survey talking about current developments, globalization, and the complicated legacy of precolonial, colonial, and postoclonial eras (if they even really break down that neatly)--and these discussions are great moments for global thinking, so history really does extend right up to the present day.
(My neighbor stated that anything after the Mongols was journalism. I'm inclined to think he was joking, but then again, I don't think he's ever taught anything more recent than 1400.)
Since I studied Ancient History this problem of separating history from the present didn't really come up much for me (evidently), but it appears the contemporary history department didn't really bother with such separation either.
In my MA I did an elective course on "Wars in Afghanistan 1830-present". This was the spring of 2007, and I wrote a paper on the draft of FM 3-24 which was published in June 2006. Can we say I was studying history at that point? I think we can. Analysing FM 3-24 and the ideas contained therein was no different from analysing any other source. Instead of being in some kind of archive or in the Classics library, I spent my time in the library of the military academy.
The methodology is the same, so why wouldn't it be 'doing history'?