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. Tiago Mata