Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back Claire BondPotter and Renee C. Romano, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Abstract

Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.The it seems, keeps getting farther away-or, rather, what passes for a legitimate past does. In the early 1940s, Richard Hofstadter wrote a celebrated dissertation that became Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. His study ended little more than twenty years before the Columbia graduate student began casting about for a thesis topic, yet few carped that Hofstadter's probing assessment of American political and intellectual culture was recent.Similarly, a scholar who wants to write about the history of video games might find that others look askance upon mention of his dissertation topic, even though more than forty years have passed since Pong introduced the world to electronic gaming. While the multibillion dollar game industry has grown so big that it grossed more than the Hollywood box office in 2008, as Jeremy K. Saucier points out in Doing Recent History, a new anthology, it has received little sustained attention from historians. For some, the technological innovations of the 1970s may feel too recent or frivolous to qualify as being worthy of history, but Doing Recent History suggests otherwise. As part of the University of Georgia Press's Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America series, it promises a fair hearing to the historical problems and processes that shape our daily lives in the early twenty-first century, from the rise of new technologies and religious movements to the contested legacies of feminism and civil rights.Indeed, the last forty years have a history that deserves telling. As Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano observe in their introduction, historians have only begun to get a grip on the late twentieth century, an epoch that senior scholars such as Sean Wilentz {The Age of Reagan, 2008) and Daniel Rodgers {The Age of Fracture, 2011) have recently attempted to characterize. They intuit that American life took a distinct turn in the 1970s, and they search for a defining theme or narrative: the triumph of conservatism, the impact of new technology, the reordering of the world economy in an age of globalization. Such histories, while urgent and important, run the risk of succumbing to the limits of the historian's own personal narrative: it is a past they grew up with, a past that is even past, to crib from Faulkner. In contrast, the last fifteen years have seen the publication of new histories of the 1960s, which benefit from the historical distance that a new generation of scholars, such as Doug Rossinow and John McMillian, bring to events they themselves did not experience.All historians, of course, wrestle with their own investment in the subjects they choose to study, and this question of proximity to the recent past is one that the authors of Doing Recent History address throughout this engaging volume. Eschewing the integrative approach of Rodgers or Wilentz, these essays look at a grab bag of issues and reveal striking problems that property rights, technology, federal regulations, and the prejudices of our own discipline pose for studying the not-too-distant past. …