What counts as history?

[Beet]

How far back do you have to go? r/history says 20 years.

 To me there are two objective metrics, both very conservative.

The first is the latest date where the majority of people then living are now dead. The idea is that, that world is more dead than alive. Therefore it's history. By my estimates this means history began, at the time of this post, in the mid-1960s. So for example, the assassination of RFK is a distant current event, but not yet a historical event.

The other is even more conservative: the date where no one then alive is still alive. The idea is that it's a closed world; the story of every living person in that world is now finished. It is outside of living memory; it is further away than the maximum human lifespan. The latest possible date at the time of this writing is 1902, but owing to the possibility that people with an unverified age are older than the oldest person with a verified age, it could be earlier. A good rule of thumb appears to be about 120 years. But this definition is extreme, as it would record World War I, and perhaps the Boer War, as a current event, and that doesn't seem right. However, there is an undeniable logic to it.

[kcguy]

The 1960's seems too long ago.

I've finally reached the age where a majority of American adults are younger than me, and even I'm not old enough to remember Watergate.

My personal metric is about 25 years, and that number may be a little high.  The Cold War is unquestionably history in my mind.  And we're starting to get to the point where 9/11 feels more like history than recent events.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

*dies of laughter*

[The Mikado]

This gets into a whole complicated History vs Memory debate. There certainly have always been historical texts written about recent-ish events (look at all of the histories of WWII written before 1965 or 1970 or wherever your arbitrary "history" cutoff is), but people who write about extremely recent events are usually directly impacted by them and are trying to set the terms of the debate going forward/get their view out first. The further you get, the more possible it is to view an event...not neutrally (which isn't even necessarily desireable), but at least dispassionately.

[brucejoel99]

The past.

In all seriousness, I'd say history is comprised of any event that significantly initiates, redirects, accelerates, or halts change over time, regardless of whether said event was yesterday or 100 years ago.

[Blair]

*dies of laughter*

As a history graduate this thread presents some challenges for the entirety of my degree.

[Meclazine for Israel]

That's easy.

Something that is interesting enough to tell as a story at a dinner party without people falling asleep or leaving.

Because if people fall asleep or leave with the story incomplete, then they cannot tell it at another dinner party.

[Georg Ebner]

Since at least KANT we should know, that we are encapsulated in our consciousness: We are perhaps in this world, perhaps not - we cannot know; but we know, that the world is in us.

As a result History is - as the Greek terminus ("historia" = "[all] knowledge") demonstrates already - the only real science, because we aren't angels, ahistorical&pure essences thrown into history; we do not have history, we are history (although we are not only history): "I am I and my condition." (GOMEZ DAVILA)

Every historian is obviously an AutoBiographer; a good historian is not an aseptic nonpartisan flaneur; it's someone, who is able to incorporate as a whole "the suffering and fighting homo" (BURCKHARDT).

The corpus, that incorporated best the wholeness of human consciousness (by being even an antithetic echo of all aberrations) was the Roman-Catholic Church.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

You guys know that contemporary history is an actual field of study?