The Latest Catastrophe History, the Present, the Contemporary

Rousso sets two tasks for himself: (1) to provide a history of the problem of contemporariness in history writing, starting in ancient Greece and coming up to today; (2) to analyze how contemporary history came to be a sub-discipline and especially how it arose in response to mass political violence in Europe over the course of the 20th century. No doubt, his is a European view but his cases come not just from French but from English, American, and German historiography and history. Above all, he is interested in how historians grapple with the problem of distance from an event even if they may have been participants. He is further interested in the struggle between older historians who may have lived through a period of history and younger ones who claim they can understand his experience. "