Doing Recent History
Subtitle: On privacy, copyright, video games, institutional review boards, activist scholarship, and history that talks back
By: edited by Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano
Series: Since 1970 : histories of contemporary America
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780820334677; 9780820343020
Subjects: Historiography; Modern History; Sources; Methodology; Metholodolgy; Metholdology; Technological innovations; History
Description: "Historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. From Walmart to disco and from Chavez to Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline.

Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Just over our shoulder : the pleasures and perils of writing the recent past / Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter; title: Not dead yet : my identity crisis as a historian of the recent past / Renee C. Romano; title: Working without a script : reflections on teaching recent American history / Shelley Sang-Hee Lee; title: Opening archives on the recent American past : reconciling the ethics of access and the ethics of privacy / Laura Clark Brown and Nancy Kaiser; title: Who owns your archive? : historians and the challenge of intellectual property law / Gail Drakes; title: The Berkeley compromise : oral history, human subjects, and the meaning of "research" / Martin Meeker; title: The presence of the past : iconic moments and the politics of interviewing in Birmingham / Willoughby Anderson; title: When radical feminism talks back : taking an ethnographic turn in the living past / Claire Bond Potter; title: Do historians watch enough TV? : broadcast news as a primary source / David Greenberg; title: Playing the past : the video game simulation as recent American history / Jeremy K. Saucier; title: Eternal flames : the translingual imperative in the study of World War II memories /  Alice Yang and Alan S. Christy; title: When the present disrupts the past : narrating home care / Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein; title: "Cult" knowledge : the challenges of studying new religious movements in America / Julius H. Bailey.