I think Philippe is getting us on the right track, to consider the
difficulties of doing recent history.

Still, I disagree there is a bias in the historical discipline towards
the distant past. It might be true for humanities-history, not so for
social-science-history. Cliometricians will work on recent subjects.
Historians in cultural studies, feminist, chicano, black studies will
also inch towards the present. This I think is a clue. Care for the
distant past may have something to do with the role the canon plays in
these fields. Some history of economics has that character too:
reading and re-reading great white men and comparing less great white
men against that standard. I know of an ECHE conference on the subject
and I have found useful Warren Samuels (2001) "The Canon in
Economics." in Peart and Forget (eds.) Re?ections on the Classical
Canon in Economics: Essays in honor of
Samuel Hollander. New York: Routledge, pp. 482-499.

I don't know if we can compare and rank the difficulties of recent and
distant history. I am not sure what the metric might be. I could
hardly command the imagination to picture pre-revolutionary France,
for me sixties USA is a lot easier to conceive. For the rest I agree
with Philippe. Many times the response to my work has been "I never
expected to have become history." There is a prejudice here that
history is about dead people and once you become part of history, you
are finished, concluded. There is also a concern for ownership. People
want to write their own history, leave a testament of their life, and
the historian may seem like an intruder. Subjects being subjected.
There are difficulties of access, as Roger noted concerning archives.
For me though, the most significant difficulty is the construction of
the archive/historical record. Historians of recent economics are
actively constructing archives, selecting what gets registered or not.
I believe this is not an issue for those studying the distant past. I
think we need more reflection on this topic.

A book that covers a lot of this ground is:
The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine :
writing recent science. Ronald E. Doel and Thomas S?derqvist. London:
Routledge. 2006.

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