Reddit mentions of From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post-cold War World

Although much of what I say will overlap with /u/yodatracist's excellent post, I'll go ahead and thrown in my two cents. I've stated this before when the matter gets brought up, but historians are much more concerned with there being a coherent narrative than they are with discussing events close to the present. There isn't really any set time for when the past becomes history, and I can't think of many historians who support any notion about a deadline in which history stops and the present begins. I, and I think the vast majority of historians, would consider that position absolutely ludicrous as the two "eras" are obviously fluid. As such, the twenty years rule in this sub-reddit, in my opinion, is an arbitrary, largely unhistorical (methodologically-speaking) constraint meant to discourage over-zealous political discussion devoid of historical understanding. As /u/yodatsracist has already pointed out, however, we already know that time does not lead to objectivity. Relatedly, the close temporal proximity of events does not necessarily lead to bad or incomplete histories. There are, using examples from my interests, some great books about very recent American history in a post-9/11 world such as Mary Dudziak's September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?, Hal Brands's From Berlin to Baghdad, or Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier's America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11.

Furthermore, by refusing to discuss contemporary history, historians willfully disregard their most important task within the public sphere, that of providing clarification about the present by providing a better understanding of the past. As such, we see history become dictated almost completely by institutions of authority, or those who first and foremost have a political axe to grind. We saw this very much in the aftermath of 9/11, as politicians and news commentators ran rampant while historians largely stayed in their ivory towers. Far from insulating themselves from contemporary events, historians should jump at the chance to enter the public debate on such topics. It's in these instances that historians need to vocally make themselves present within the public debate by putting events within proper historical context. Thus, while historians may not necessarily believe in a certain time period deadline from which their study is no longer relevant, I do believe that there are still many historians that avoid recent history, not because it is recent, but because it is so decidedly political. Yet in doing so historians throw away any semblance of their usefulness in the public sphere.