First time poster, I love this sub, thank you!
I noticed the rule about not asking about events in the last 20 years, and it reminded me of something.
In all of my formal education (I was not a history major in college), I remember thinking that the history courses always seemed to end just when they were getting interesting, that is, when they began to connect to events that I (as a young person) might have some knowledge of.
I was alive before the Cold War ended, but about the time I finished my last core history class in college I sat down and did some research on the Cold War because it wasn't really covered in much detail in my classes.
I understand the reason for the rule here - you want to focus on history, not recent events. But my question is about the teaching of history.
Has anyone else noticed this?
And, is there a rule or practice against connecting historical events to recent events, or is it just a tendency?
For secondary school curricula, the main factor is a lack of time to cover all the material in a semester. A course on American history usually begins in the era of colonial settlement in North America and caps off with the Civil War and (hopefully) some Reconstruction by the winter break. Following this, the spring curricula has a lot to focus on between the Gilded Age period and 20th American history, and with tests and projects heavily cutting into lecture time, making it still more to difficult to get past the early to mid Cold War before the year ends.
More broadly, the reason contemporary events aren't talked about as much by historians and why this subreddit has a 20 year rule is because it takes time for historical narratives and schools of thought and interpretation to develop. Events are more deeply contextualized by observing their aftermath and residual effects, and that is what defines them as historical in the first place. The further back an event is temporally, the more "historical" it tends to be. The more recent an event is, the more jumbled and removed it is from a broader context of human cause and effect. It takes time for reasoned histories of an event to come into being, and historical narratives on events are constantly challenged, defended, uprooted, or affirmed thereafter. I hope that makes sense.