Hello all. I am completely aware of the 20 year rule, and even though I’ll use modern examples, this is still a question about historiography so I think it should still be fine. I understand why that rule exists, and why historians in general do not talk about or study recent or contemporary events (bias of the writer, limited resources, “raw” subjects that might still be controversial), but looking at the world since roughly 2010, so much has happened that clearly will have effects for decades to come, why aren’t historians beginning the process of collecting research? If I recall correctly, Alistair Horne began his long research process for A Savage War of Peace only a couple of years after the war had ended in 1962, and he was talking with veterans and important leaders by the 70’s. Antiquity is in no way a forte of mine, but didn’t Thucydides begin recording the Peloponnesian War as it was happening?
I’m just using it as an example because as a venezolano it is something I’m familiar with, but how would a historian go about writing a history of the chavísta regime up to now, or at the very least until Chavez’ death? Or the Arab Spring? Or the Syrian revolution that became the civil war of today? These are periods of history that clearly have huge ramifications for millions of people, wouldn’t the recording/research process be best done while memories are fresh? Of course I realize that sources can be declassified or uncovered years or decades later, but I think it would be fair to say that many sources could also be destroyed over time, or memories fade before they are recorded. I realize completely that these first histories will necessarily, inherently, and must be biased because they are so close to the events and people themselves, but don’t accounts like these serve as the base on which future “neutral” and more academic work is built?
The thing is I’m not positive that this is simply the realm of journalists either. If we go back to the Venezuela example (again, not asking for a discussion on its history), a journalist talking about the economic crisis now and Maduro’s call for an Asemblea Constituyente for a new constitution wouldn’t necessarily look at the same sources and documents a historian would, and certainly not with their scope, contemporary articles talking about Venezuela now only discuss its history since Chavez’ death in 2013. Contemporary articles wouldn’t look at anything before the 2002 attempted coup and certainly not anything from the previous Caldera and Andrés Pérez administrations for context. I can’t find any books from academic historians that chronicle any period of the Chavísta regime, even though this began in 1999. (If any one has suggestions I would gladly appreciate it, even though, again, it’s not the point of this post)
To conclude, I understand why as serious academics historians must strive to be as unbiased as possible, and it would be practically impossible to do that studying and writing about recent and contemporary events, but that doesn’t mean that those events aren’t products and creators of very important history deserving of study. If anything it seems to create a gap where contemporaries who want to understand current events must make do with histories that stop well before the periods in question.
This gets into the "at what point is it history?" question, which is a bit meta. Generally, reporting on current events is the province of journalism; the goal of history-minded folks is to archive and preserve as many primary sources as possible, so that when the time comes to study, learn, analyze, and interpret those events, those sources are available. Most organizations and individuals do this, purposefully or not, to some degree anyway: we carry our extended memory in documentation and archives, and many records are set up to archive automatically - your bank account, for example, has records of the transactions you have made over the last few years, possibly going all the way back to when you opened the account. For those really interested in preserving a record, however, archiving becomes more purposeful: identifying important sources and working to preserve them properly rather than haphazardly, interviewing key individuals, seeing that people leave their papers with institutions that can properly catalog and care for them, etc.
And yes, that means you can absolutely start writing a "history" while the current events are playing out. Again, many people do this rather naturally - in diaries, interviews, anecdotes about their life, in an effort to create a narrative to explain what is going on or how we got here - they draw on the events of the immediate past and try to fit it into their narrative of defining the present. That's what happens when journalists get historical for a piece, for example. Historians, ideally, take a longer view and a more disciplined approach, recognizing that they don't have the whole picture and that current events are in flux - living people can change their stories, documents can be corrected and discovered, etc.
Which is part of the reason why academic history doesn't tend to get published while the events under consideration are playing out; even most histories of conflict written by the participants have the good sense and taste to wait for the official cessation of hostilities before pushing out a book...although there are exceptions. Likewise, publishing takes time. Less time, in this era of digital publishing, but still actual time to get books written, contracts signed, books printed and shipped and available for review.