Contemporary History..

" All history is 'contemporary history' declared Croce meaning that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems."

Coming to think of contemporary history, I think its aim would be purely to conceptualise, contextualize and historicise, to explain – some aspect of the recent past or to provide a historical understanding of current trends or developments. Thus according to Gilbert, G.John, in his book "Contemporary History of India" provides information on the social, political and economic history of free India. His book attempts to analyze social issues like untouchability, gender equality, unemployment and other related problems like poverty and overpopulation.

Thus I feel that interdisciplinarity has allowed contemporary historians to use concepts and theories to enhance their understanding of the recent past. For example those interested in political history have to be aware of the recent works of political scientists, the constitutional developments and in social history. Social history, sometimes described as the 'history of the people', or 'history from below' emerged with the object of interest being agents of social change.

I now will state the example of "oral history" where we see that possibility of interviewing people, of capturing their memories and interrogating them for information, has been a resource available only to historians working on the recent past. The use of oral history has helped to recover the history of those who may not have left written records behind or who were in other ways silent. The history of working-class lives, for example, has been better brought to life by oral history. However, its use has not been uncontroversial because it is a well-known fact that memory is fallible, because people may lie, so, critics say, oral history is inherently flawed.

I therefore think that the main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate, for if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording.
For this reason E.H Carr in his book What is History talks about the fact that all historical judgements involve persons and points of view, where one is as good as another and there is no objective truth.

Thus according to Collingwood, the past which the historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present. Hence all history is the history of thought, and history is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying. The reconstitution of the past in the historians mind is dependent on empirical evidence. An example of the empirical theory is the sociology of law, where we see that the founders of sociology as a discipline regarded the sociology of law as an integral part of social theory. Law and its historical variations were treated by them as constitutive components of social life. This can be demonstrated especially with regard to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber.

Thus the empirical school marks the distinction between the two processes by defining a fact as a datum of experience as distinct from conclusions. This is called the 'common sense' view of history. History thus consists of a corpus of ascertained facts, which are available to the historian in documents and inscriptions. It is this common sense view that states
basic facts for all historians which form the backbone of history. History according to me thus is made up of facts which encroach on the on the observer from outside, and are free of his consciousness.

Indeed, observation serves as one of an historian's most important and powerful tools. The passage of time can allow hidden source materials to surface, and long-term effects to become evident. However, it doesn't always take observation to recognize an important event. Recently generated source materials can easily be discarded and lost forever since many people equate "historic" only with "old", but this is not true, history is not always associated with the old, there are various facets of contemporary history which provide a link between the past and the present and are important in terms of social change today.