Contemporary History Research Paper

Those critical of the field reproach it with its lack of perspective and its paucity of sources, above all since most nationally preserved archives are closed for a customary 30 years or more. Critics also complain that there is no dividing line between contemporary history and mere political partisanship or ‘journalism’—a term usually meant to suggest that an account must be ephemeral and partial. These critiques will be considered at the end of this research paper. Recall, however, that one of the very greatest of ancient historians, Thucydides, insisted that explaining and narrating the great civil war still engulfing the Hellenic world as he wrote, was a valid historical exercise.

Contemporary history has, in fact been a historiographical enterprise as venerable as any other. The great French medievalist Marc Bloch also denied a radical break between past and present. Contemporary history is contrasted with the history of a relatively remote past. (Bloch, 1949, p. 89, Noiriel, 1999, pp. 7–28). Those who distrust contemporary history suggest that ‘the past is another country,’ by which it is meant that the ways of thinking and acting, the principles for collective association, the bonds of loyalty and governance, are different enough from our own, such that the historian must work his way into them through hermeneutic dealing with sources. But this remoteness is no less true for many societies in the world of the twenty-first century. Nor can the remote past be totally strange; otherwise there would be no way of arriving at statements of motivation or descriptions of behavior. No history can presuppose radical alterity.

The time period included in ‘contemporary history’ has never been rigidly defined in any national usage. Contemporary history usually signifies a contrast with ‘modern history,’ a term that most Western historians now apply to the entire period since the French Revolution, although before ‘contemporary history,’ came into usage, ‘modern history’ was sometimes extended to the entire epoch since the close of the Middle Ages. In 1775, the German historian J. G. Busch distinguished modern from medieval and ancient history, and within modern history, an epoch even more recent. After the French Revolution, some historians, including Ranke, labeled post- revolutionary history as the ‘newest’ or more recent history within the newer history dating from 1492. Not only Leopold von Ranke, but also many of the major German historians of the nineteenth century devoted lectures to the most recent events, whether the revolution of 1848 or the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Defending the study of contemporary history in 1886, Emile Bourgeois contrasted its application by scholars and teachers to events after 1789 with the popular notion of the history ‘of our own generation.’ The latter, he proposed, faced pitfalls, but what he preferred, following the Germans, to call ‘modern history’ since 1789, could be studied as a science. (Bourgeois 1886 pp. 12–4) In today’s contexts the term has become a synonym for twentieth-century history or Western history since 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. The Journal of Contemporary History, founded by Walter Laqueur and George Mosse in 1966, has taken the twentieth century as its purview and its first issue focused on the rise of fascism. In other contexts, it remains the history of the ideological conflicts that led to the rise of fascism and Nazism, the Second World War and afterward. In the Soviet Union the Bolshevik or ‘October’ Revolution formed an ideologically defined boundary. Still other historians, above all in the North American context, apply it to post-World War II events, i.e., to the period since 1945. Outside Europe and the Americas it can refer to the period of national independence since the end of colonial rule.

Sometimes contemporary history is construed as comprising the era from which historical participants are still alive. Modern, as well as ancient historians have considered the availability of live witnesses to be essential: Thucydides cited the questioning of witnesses as one of the scientific sources of his researches. The Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Present, re-organized in 1980, defined the presence of witnesses as a crucial criterion for its investigative mission. But if the starting point is not fixed, the end point is. Common to all definitions of contemporary history is the idea that it must extend, whether as events or as the account of those events, until the present day. It is designed to explain current social, political, or cultural development. While ‘post-modern’ has become a general term in cultural studies, post-contemporary remains oxymoronic, although in fact some German advocates of ‘Zeitgeschichte’ argued that the post- 1945 period constituted a ‘newer’ rather than an older contemporary history.

2. What Qualities Define Contemporary History?

Beyond the criterion of recentness or actuality, is there any distinguishing characteristic to contemporary history? Does it have any real specificity on non-temporal grounds? Contemporary history is history that is usually deemed to provide an explanatory or interpretive background for events still being con-tested or whose ramifications are still affecting current political or social development. But non-contemporary history also performs this function. The history of African-American slavery would not be described as contemporary history even though that institution still casts a long and powerful shadow over current American politics. All major developments permanently structure today’s alternatives and all history presupposes such an enduring influence. Most historians seek to defend the ‘relevance’ of their inquiry—sometimes by claiming analogies with the past, sometimes by claiming a real, even if remote, impact of past events on the present. Such a claim alone cannot distinguish contemporary history. Nonetheless, contemporary history often has an impact— and is intended to have an impact—on current political outcomes. Contemporary history comprises narratives and explanations that lead to policy decisions, electoral contests, and sometimes to political trials. It is a history with consequences. This does not mean that contemporary history is less capable of escaping partisan judgements than history of the remote past. Historians of all eras bring to bear their values and political temperaments. They cannot shed these al-though they can and should achieve self-insight into the way their psychological make-up conditions their interpretation. In this respect the contemporary historian can muster an equal degree of self-insight. Certainly his or her history can prove as encompassing and detached as the history of more remote eras. Still, contemporary history bears an intimate relationship to the choices facing the society in which the historian is rooted. Such choices often seem particularly urgent because they are the legacy, not only of long trends and development, but also of episodes of recent conflict, and sometimes violence.

Thus, while the particular beginning point of con-temporary history can be subject to debate, it is usually and logically taken to be a significant ‘rupture’ or caesura in the recent past. (This suggests that contemporary history, now so often defined as history since 1945, may within a few decades be interpreted as history since 1989. The first issue of the Italian journal Contemporanea cited the events of the late 1980s and 1990s as constituting ‘a turning point in world history, imposed with the force of a periodizing caesura.’ (p. 3)) Such ruptures, often accompanied by radical change and intense political or international conflict, require explanations and narratives designed to ac-count for the sudden transition of institutions or regimes. Even where a new regime decides to forswear any judgmental effort about the past, the transition itself, the process by which a seemingly stable set of institutions, gave way to another, requires intellectual mastery.

Not surprisingly, it was in France, where the Third Republic remained a contested regime until World War I, that the political stakes of contemporary history most starkly emerged. For conservatives, the French defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870 demonstrated the Revolution of 1789 had undermined national cohesion. Hippolyte Taine’s Origines de la France Contemporaine (1875–1893) explained the debility of French society as a legacy of the Revolution; the Societe d’ Histoire Contemporaine (1890) remained under Catholic conservative influence. But the Left did not simply cede contemporary history to the Right; Emile Bourgeois (1886) excoriated Taine’s indictment, anticipated all the later criticisms of post-1989 history, but claimed the enterprise was no less valid than ‘doing a writing’ of the history of earlier epochs. The Republicans in power created a Chair in Modern and Contemporary History in 1884 and ensconced in the University, the historians of the Left founded the Re ue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (1890). Pro-Republic historians fought for control of the official history texts taught in schools, among them Ernest Lavisse’s 10-volume Histoire de la France contemporaine de la Revolution a 1919 (Noiriel 1998, p. 14).

Contemporary history has thus often originated as an effort to determine responsibilities, often for disastrous outcomes (either on the part of those acting for the old order or for the new holders of power). Institutions established to research contemporary history have had the assignment of examining the origins and responsibility for recent human-rights abuses. If such painful episodes as dictatorship or state-sponsored terror, revolutionary upheaval or war and sometimes the collaboration of citizens with an occupying power had not taken place, contemporary history might be a less compelling enterprise. Sponsorship of contemporary history often involves a society’s self-examination—despite the reticence on the part of those wishing to avoid confronting their own complicity—after political catastrophe, whether humiliating defeat in war or domestic recourse to terror or authoritarianism.

Such a self-reckoning encounters resistance among historians as well as from former power holders. Nominally designating the field as a special branch of history allows some of this reticence to be overcome, whether political or academic. In Germany and France, the respective terms ‘Zeitgeschichte’ and ‘Histoire du Temps Present,’ were adopted in part to differentiate their fields of study from history that had been academically credentialled. In the German case, early postwar researchers into the National Socialist period confronted a widespread resistance among professional colleagues to study the Third Reich. The alleged reasons given were the closeness of the period and the passions it aroused—in fact, many scholars, of course, had been highly supportive of the regime. Still, emigre scholars, new political leaders, and an emerging generation of historians understood that the Nazi period could not be bracketed off on the grounds of being too close to study.

In fact, the proximity of the Third Reich led some historians to argue, not that one must be more distant, but that rather only those who had experienced the temptations of National Socialism might understand how complicated the moral as well as historical issues were in order to really understand its history. Out-siders and those who came later would allegedly lack the capacity for ‘Verstehen’ or empathetic immersion into the events that German Historismus had always prescribed. As the author of a major discussion of postwar German and Japanese historiography writes (Conrad 1999, p. 217): ‘objectification without the mediating role of empathy (Einfuhlung), according to this view, had to produce a distorted image: the Germans would appear merely as a distant object and no longer the legitimate subject of history.’

3. Institutes, Progress, And Controversies

In 1950, the German Federal and state governments financed the Munich-based Institute for the History of the National Socialist Era, renamed simply the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte in 1952. It became the leading research institute into National Socialism, engaged some of the most promising researchers, and since 1953 has issued the indispensable ‘Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeit-geschichte,’ devoted to publishing documents as well as narrative and interpretative studies, and a series of book-length monographs. The Institute and its quarterly represented recognition that the Nazi era formed part of German history but presented particular historiographical challenges. The concept of ‘Zeit-geschichte’ or ‘contemporary history’ legitimized opening up scholarly research on this painful, indeed often shameful, past, but simultaneously recognized some theoretical distance from more distant and settled subjects. From its reappearance in 1949 to 1960, the traditional Historische Zeitschrift only published one substantive article on the NS period. Even the leading Third Reich researcher Hans Buchheim, argued that the NS period was not appropriate for doctoral research although courses were offered— often by visiting or returning emigres such as Hans Rosenberg—at the university level. The topics usually involved the factors undermining Weimar, the foreign and military policy of the Third Reich, and the unsuccessful Twentieth of July plot. The publication of Karl Dieter Bracher’s magisterial Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (1955) finally presented the success of the Third Reich within the long-term structures of German history; nonetheless, the author was trained as a political scientist; he understood his task less burdened by the inhibitions of the historical profession. Bracher’s work duly arrayed structural, ideological, and contingent factors. Still, to envisage Nazism as a consequence of the long-term continuities of modern German history—that is, its institutional and social structures and not just supposedly general leanings toward authoritarianism—remained the agenda of subsequent historians. For the researchers of the 1960s, the buffer of ‘contemporary history’ became less essential: Nazism represented only the latest and most extreme recourse of old and new elites who resorted throughout the modern period to national expansion and authoritarian measures. And only by the decades of the 1970s and 1980s did historians seek to probe the ‘mentalities’ of ordinary Germans under the regime, to measure the acquiescence or enthusiasm for the regime and for its anti-Semitic program. The Institut fur Zeitgeschichte carried out some of its most original work within the so-called Bavarian project organized by director Martin Broszat, which was an effort to explore the categories of enthusiasm, acceptance, and ‘Resistenz’ (or small-scale noncompliance) in the Third Reich.

This research program, for all the insights it generated, revealed that the conceptual difficulties raised by the Nazi experience still lingered as special challenges for Zeitgeschichte. Whether in scholarly works such as those of Ian Kershaw or popular depiction of the Nazi era in the German television series Heimat—and contemporary history is increasingly presented by the visual media—Nazi rule still appeared to impinge as a force from outside society. It did not really penetrate the local community. Widespread acts of ‘Resistenz’ suggested a society that endeavored to maintain its autonomy from politics. Contemporary history had begun as an effort to account for the highly disturbing victory of the National Socialists; three decades later, it focused on the limits of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, the most recent studies of denunciation and police activity (Fitzpatrick and Gellately 1997) have again placed the accent on the self-policing of society rather than its resistance.

In France the Comite d’histoire de la Second Guerre Mondiale was transformed by the initiative of Rene Remond and other historians into the Institut pour l’Histoire du Temps Present, which in the 1980s and 1990s became the leading foyer for research on con-temporary France. Its debut marked a new willingness to focus on the Vichy period, which had been subject to euphemism and obscurity. Perhaps because it was early taken in hand by a younger generation of researchers—a development that occurred only later in the trajectory of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte—its conceptual categories for dealing with traumatic his-tory were less evasive. It has had a remarkable series of colloques in which actors and historians have met together to consider such subjects as labor under Vichy or the early efforts at postwar economic and social transformation. Such countervailing and critical interaction would probably not have been possible in Germany; where in effect younger historians gradually had to press for deeper investigations. Still, French research was also subject to equivalent resistance to full disclosure and confrontation.

Postcommunist societies have devoted major academic resources to assimilating the historical legacy of the long decades of communist rule. In East Germany popular revelations about Stasi collaboration, the debates about trying functionaries of the former GDR, and the insistence of the civic movements of 1989, have all encouraged serious historical examination of the former regime. The collapse of the GDR brought a rare opportunity to do contemporary history since the documentary sources of the regime were put at the disposal of researchers within a few years of its collapse. Aside from numerous memoirs and popular accounts, a major center for carrying on this research has been the Zentrum fur Zeitgeschichtliche Forschung in Potsdam (originally Schwerpunkt Zeit-geschichtliche Forschung), an institute that incorporated researchers from the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR and was entrusted with the mission of studying the GDR as a regime. While its personnel and approach were severely contested at first by dissidents, who felt that it was quasi-apologetic, the ZZF has now brought out significant edited monographs on culture and society in the former GDR as well as more traditional accounts of international relations and politics.

War origins and responsibilities have traditionally been a major source for contemporary historical research ever since Thucydides, although the investigations are not always thought of as ‘contemporary history’ as such. World War I led to rival publications of diplomatic documents and then narrative accounts of the international relations that led to the conflict. These were often partial, but based upon recently opened—if often very incomplete— archival sources, but the history that emerged was not conceived of as a particular or tentative branch of history. US historiographical revision, somewhat analogous to the difficult reassessments in Germany and France, also marked the late 1950s and 1960s. ‘Revisionist’ historians (the term ‘revisionist’ has had successive applications over time) aroused harsh denunciations when they suggested that Americans, not Soviets were largely responsible for the Cold War, whether because of the personality of Truman or the ‘needs’ of American capitalism for world-wide markets. A particularly bitter controversy arose over the use of the atomic bomb, which Gar Alperowitz suggested was designed to intimidate the Soviets, not end a war with Japan that had shortly to yield victory in any case (Maier 1970).

The emergence of the ‘new’ historians in Israel prior to 1990 should also be understood as part of this worldwide wave of reconsidering taboo subjects, pre-eminently the fate of the Arab population living in the area of Palestine that would become the Jewish state. The traditional accounts of the 1947–48 founding of the country overwhelmingly alleged that the Palestinians had fled from their homes in the Jewish regions on instructions from Arab leaders who promised that they would be resettled after Israel was defeated. The ‘New Historians’ have instead blamed Israeli leadership for aggressive action against Arab civilians in an effort to uproot as many as possible.

In Japan, debate over the origins of the Pacific War was often lively in university milieus, but more inhibited in schools and public forums. An initial postwar willingness to question Japanese policies was not followed to the same degree as in Germany and Japan has often been depicted as a victim of the war, a view reinforced by the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, among professional historians and increasingly in the wider public, more self-critical accounts have been emerging. The Nanjing massacre has brought sustained historical debate, in which the Japanese profession revealed itself as un-ready to reconsider the dissident view of the war.

Thus while ‘contemporary history’ is a term that denotes no more than particular chronological criteria, recent output suggests that its implicit subject matter has been the opening up of the earlier ‘shameful’ experiences of a society, at least those within the memory of living participants. Thus the whole question and to what extent citizens cooperated remains morally and analytically troubling. Until the end of the 1960s, historians and political analysts tended to emphasize the power of the totalitarian regime—its capacity for violence, atomization, conquest, and subjugation of an autonomous society. Thereafter, analytical histories argued for the limits of totalitarian rule and the persistence of ‘niches’ where individuals could conduct a normal private life whether under National Socialism or Communism. By the 1990s contemporary historians were tending to examine not the immunity of society from dictatorship but rather the self-policing of society. The legacies of 1945 and 1989 in Europe have made Nazism, Fascist, collaborationist, and Communist regimes—the problem of ‘totalitarianism’—perhaps the leading theme for contemporary historians, as the dismantling of South African Apartheid and military dictatorships in Latin America has done elsewhere. Contemporary history has wrestled with the issue of how to describe the nature of acquiescence, enthusiasm, and dissent under totalitarianism. Research has come to center on the relationship between civil society (that category rediscovered for scholarship by 1989) with political authority (Fitzpatrick and Gellately 1997).

4. Contemporary History As ‘Collective Memory’

Given its highly charged political content, research into contemporary history has surged into new forums, which produce not a historical narrative as traditionally understood, but important efforts to reconstruct and critically evaluate the national past. Distinctive since around 1980 has been the wide recourse to official bodies to investigate—and to acknowledge publicly—the human-rights abuses of authoritarian regimes that have been dismantled. The work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be construed as an investigation into contemporary history (the case is less persuasive for commissions that took their evidence in secret). Its objective was not primarily to establish a historical narrative but to hear testimony from victims and acknowledge the violence done to those testifying. By being established with the right to confer amnesty, the TRC encouraged perpetrators to describe their role in enforcing the Apartheid regime.

Truth commissions or other committees of inquiry can, but need not, produce traditional historical accounts. The TRC, for example, elicited many partial narratives of personal experience and explanations of why and how both perpetrators and victims behaved. The findings presented are not usually cross-examined or subject to critique of sources and methods. A contemporary history of Apartheid, for example, would require an effort at synthesis and contextualization within an overarching temporal account that fully revealed. For instance, such structural and background issues as sources of investment and labor, migration of whites and blacks, long-term ideological formation, and the Anglo-Boer clash. In short, the whole relevant history of the society before and during Apartheid. It would sacrifice immediacy for more encompassing perspective (Truth vs. Justice 2000; Rotberg and Thompson 2000). Nonetheless, this sort of public hearing has increasingly served, in effect, as the first approach to a historical account of the previous regime.

The motivation behind such efforts remains more admittedly political than most academic historians would feel comfortable acknowledging. Former victims and dissenters urge exposure of the past as a moral and political as well as historical acquisition. The East German Citizens Movement (Burgerbewegung) pressed for a large-scale German parliamentary inquiry, the Enquete-Commission, into the functioning of the East German regime that produced volumes of testimony and analytical essays. In this respect much of the impetus for contemporary history, as the history of a military experience or dictatorship, emerges not just from professional historians but from advocacy groups.

Such efforts represent an effort not just to advance historical research, but to establish versions of what the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called ‘collective memory,’ the construction of a group’s version of the past (and not just a retrieval of events gone by). As an activity, contemporary history thus involves, along with traditional research and official boards of inquiry, many volunteer efforts to memorialize historical sites and record interviews for local history (the ‘history-workshop’ movement). The themes can be work and family experience, the impact of major events, such as war or political programs on local life. History is also increasingly presented in a museological context. Museum curators or those charged with exhibitions have pressed agendas of historical reassessment, often to encounter opposition and charges of distorting the past. The 1995 ‘Enola Gay’ exhibit at the Aerospace Museum that was to focus on the American bombing of Hiroshima seemed critical enough of American policy to incite veterans groups and their Congressional supporters to demand closing the exhibit, which, in fact, was substantially modified. The Wehrmacht exhibit produced by the Hamburg Institute, which featured a travelling set of photo-graphs of German army atrocities on the Eastern Front, likewise provoked criticism and reaction (Thiele 1997). Whether or not contested, such exhibits and museums play a powerful role in historical education—perhaps preeminent now is the US Holocaust Museum, which has become one of the most frequently visited Washington sites.

Finally, it is important to note that the prolific debates over museums, likewise over the concepts for memorials, have themselves become one of the major topics for contemporary history. The so-called history of memory or more precisely the history of ‘collective memory’ has developed apace along with contemporary history. It is its most self-reflective branch, and thus appeals to the intensely self-reflective trend of postmodernist culture, historical and otherwise. Obviously each of these themes opens up not just a political but a social history of power.

5. Methodology And Objections

Advocates of contemporary history have sometimes suggested that it has a distinctive methodology. But in fact it must rely on the evaluation of sources that historians learn for all periods. As with the history of earlier eras, the historian must learn to compensate for the absence of some sources and to treat those available with caution. The contemporary historian can use economic data, interviews, public-opinion surveys, the media, and available sources. Other recently developed historical approaches designed for other periods—‘everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte),’ cliometric history, ‘microhistory’ and anthropology, can be exploited for the contemporary period as well as earlier periods.

Still, contemporary history does present particular problems: the contradiction between closeness and objectivity. How often do historians who lecture on the recent past not encounter the questioner who states, ‘I was there, I know … !’ The witness will usually complain that the contemporary historian does not really have the story right. But precisely because he or she was there, the witness has experienced only one level of the story. He or she cannot usually rise above personal experience, often one that has left deep psychological scars; to attain the perspective needed for a general history. This is not a question of intent or even of mere distortions left by imperfect memory. The problem of one-sided history does not lie with the reliability of the witness or lack thereof, but with the failure to balance a story. The historian can decide that every witness or victim has, in fact, left an accurate memoir, and still have concern about the marshalling of these accounts as the major source. Those historians of Stalinist purges and the Gulag who stress their enormous human toll have given a higher value to memoirs and autobiography of ‘victims’ than so-called revisionists who have contested the high number of victims and feel that victims’ memoirs have colored the objectivity needed about the period (Getty and Manning 1993). The issue is not the reliability of the sources or the accuracy of memory, but of contextualizing the memoirs. The German historians who documented the expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe in 1945 took special care to test the reports of Soviet brutality and rape for accuracy. But that was hardly the point: what made these reports problematic was the fact that the authors showed no equivalent concern for the victims on the other side and thereby could hardly furnish a satisfactory ac-count of causality (Aly 1997, Conrad 1999). Con-temporary history can be afflicted with a misplaced and misleading stress on the reliability of witnesses at the expense of contexualization.

Nonetheless, most critics reproach the field its paucity of traditional sources, above all since most nationally preserved archives remain closed for a customary 30 years or more. This is often true, but it is also true to an even greater extent for periods in the remoter past. The mass of printed documentation, of statistical inquiries, of public opinion and media reports, of possible interviews, and now telephone and other records is in fact overwhelming. True, written minutes and archives will reveal debates within govern-mental agencies that may not be fully disclosed to the contemporary history. The quality of history that can be written once these become available will be more informed. But this cannot disqualify contemporary history from counting as respectable scholarship.

Critics also complain that there is no dividing line between contemporary history and mere political partisanship or journalism—a term usually meant to suggest that an account must be ephemeral and partial. But of course the issue is what sort of journalism. Historians journalistic reporting and analysis use as source material in its own right. There are historians whose narration of the past remains as superficial, as keyed to headlines without any probing of deeper explanations, as the most superficial newspaper report. And there are journalists who endeavor to uncover and integrate in a written text models of explanation as deep and persuasive as what historians propose. The valid distinction is not between history and journalism, but a history or journalism that is content with day-to-day reporting—a disclosure of events— and a history or journalism that seeks to probe and place immediate events into a framework of long-term analysis.

Contemporary history, it is charged, cannot transcend the ideological passions of the day and is thus less ‘objective’ than history of earlier times. Any reflection, however, on the history of major events will show that while consensus does finally build around some attributions of responsibility, many deep interpretative divisions persist or are renewed. There is no transcendent view of whether the Gracchi were social reformers or mere demagogues; whether revolutionary violence was a response to real enemies or a pure paranoia; whether the problem of American slavery might have been resolved without civil war; whether Germany was particularly responsible for the outbreak of World War I; and whether the Americans do or do not bear some of the responsibility for the Cold War. Political divisions are fundamental to human societies and there can be no more value-free a resolution of the issues involved for historians than there was for contemporary actors. But this does not mean that historians are condemned to partisanship. Whether dealing with events of the moment or those long since over, researchers can follow certain safe-guards. They can report the evidence that might contradict their chosen narrative interpretation or current political preference, and they can seek to include the reasoning of adversaries within an overall historical account such that it becomes multi-voiced.

It is true that contemporary history is likely to be superseded. But this is true of all historical treatments including those of antiquity—each will be rewritten as the interests and preoccupations of a current generation of scholars change. All history is subject to revision: revision in questions, revision in methods, and revision in perspectives.

Contemporary history enjoys no less sanctity. Granted, the contemporary historian must remain particularly aware that the questions that motivate him or her may be dictated by current controversies and thus soon superseded. The contemporary historian should self-consciously seek to anticipate, say, frameworks that successive generations might pose and not just the agenda of the moment. Some anticipation of the future, at least as a spectrum of possible issues and inquiry, as well as contextualization in terms of the remote past, remains necessary for the staying power of contemporary history. Thucydides understood that. Thucydides abides.

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