Just a meta post about the 20 year rule I was curious about.
I completely understand already why the 20 year rule exists, because we don't want the sub cluttered with speculations on current political or pop cultural events that detracts from the study of the past, which also gets into topics that are still controversial.
But what I'm curious about, is why the number 20 specifically? Is it just random, being approximately a single generation of time? Or does it reflect something inherent about historical research in general, that they avoid topics more recent than 20 years old? Is there a gap historical academia for topics like the rise of the Internet or Putinist Russia?
I know documentaries are often produced that touch on topics that are fairly recent, and generally speaking I'd guess modern topics are moreso the realm of journalism than history, but I'm just curious if there is some actual convention by historians on the dividing line between "history" and "now".
Here's some previous discussions on the 20 Year Rule:
The question of why 20 years specifically is also in the Roundtable, but personally, I prefer this bit from u/AncientHistory:
Twenty years is the arbitrary cutoff AskHistorians settled on because...basically that's what works. It's a nice round number, and that's about it. I wish I could tell you that we workshopped the cutoff and referenced in-depth historical analyses and had deep discussions about When IS history? but the long story short is that it's a point of convenience: there has to be some cutoff, to give a bit of distance between current events and now, and 20 years has worked pretty good so far.
Can’t wait for the 911 inside job history debates next September
"Is there a gap historical academia for topics like the rise of the Internet or Putinist Russia?"
For the latter, frankly I would say yes! 20 years might be arbitrary, but then again looking at the events of 1991 in the Soviet Union, we only really got an academic historian analyzing those events using declassified archival documentation in 2014, so it's really not that far off the mark. Honestly, academic histories for Russia and the former Soviet Union are really digging into the Stalin era, as new documentation is becoming available, and so histories tackling the post-1953 USSR are still relatively less common.
Even after 20 years, when you look at events like the 1999 apartment bombings, as was discussed here, you'll see that the available documentary evidence is pretty thin, and while we can give a shot at tackling such controversial questions, a lot of that thread boiled down to "which journalist and/or possibly biased source or unreliable narrator do you believe?". Which admittedly is a lot of what the historic profession actually does (this is pretty much the question for any ancient or medieval source which is our sole documentary evidence for a given event, as I understand it).
Anywho, regarding Putin and Putinist Russia, I would say that very much of it is still in the realm of journalism, maybe political science, but not really academic history. Steven Lee Myers' The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin is probably one of the best books published out there on the topic, but noticeably Myers is a journalist, and also his available source material thins quite a bit after 2000.