History vs. Current Events

I often debate with who ever will listen, where the history books should end and where the current events journal should begin. As I began to learn how to critically think about my sources, I began to realize that the term "current" has a much larger time frame than the past ten or twenty years.

Primary sources are among the best sources to use because they are so close to the "action". For that same reason they are the most easily debated, again because they are so close to the action." To much opinion, and selective memory is used to suit my comfort. Historians spend most of their research time evaluating and reevaluating their sources. Looking for additional information that hopefully backs up what they know or disqualifies it. Critical historians live by the old saying of "there are two sides to every story and then there is the truth." Historians live where the truth is hidden in the 12 different stories told by the 12 different people all witnessing the same event from a different view point.

The trick to evaluation lies in the years/distance from the event. While there are still living survivors and/or participants of an event, historians will have a difficult time truly knowing what actually occurred and why. There will always be too much at stake for the survivors for them to let the important roam free. My unofficial cut off date is December 7, 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Everything from 1942 onward, should be considered current as there is still too much at stake for those still living. I put qualifiers on Pearl because the baby boomers were directly effected through they're parents and still have memories of the effects of the Pearl Harbor bombing. Many still feel a nostalgia for a time when Hawaii was joining the United States (late 50s), easily recalling Hawaiian history because it was everywhere in pop culture at the time. So it's a soft line, shoot me.  :)

What is important to note is that at the time enough stories where collected and accounts/records where received that historians are now easily able to compare records. They can decipher and learn what happen to allow the Japanese to bomb Pearl, and the resulting affects on the states because of our entry in the war.


What could not be understood in 1945 or 1950 were the effects of the bombing on all of America. Most stories were of how men died, few retold how they lived through it. Where they hid, where they actually were when the 'return to base, this is not a drill' call went out on the radio. I will always argue that these are the stories that make history, the knowledge that a man stood on top of his radio station building to watch and tell the island were the bombs were falling as his world blew up around him. His building was hit and it was when the power went out that he stopped broadcasting. That is a historical event not because of the heroics of it, but because what he did affected so many people. Or the knowledge that a little girl watched the men from the crumbled and burning Arizona swim to shore through the burning water. The shore they were swimming to was nearly her front yard, and she saw a few of them later in the bunker she hid in with her mother. What people did during the attack is worth understanding, not just how governments reacted. 

Those stories aren't easily found by historians and even less easily gathered at the time. And I would argue that somehow that makes them more important.  Do I think historians should stop collecting information about my so called current events, of course not! I believe they should stop attempting to fit the event in the bigger picture.

Collect data, keep the sources clean, hold people accountable for what they say, and collect more data. That is my motto.