Includes bibliographical references and index.

Just over our shoulder : the pleasures and perils of writing the recent past / Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter -- Not dead yet : my identity crisis as a historian of the recent past / Renee C. Romano -- Working without a script : reflections on teaching recent American history / Shelley Sang-Hee Lee -- Opening archives on the recent American past : reconciling the ethics of access and the ethics of privacy / Laura Clark Brown and Nancy Kaiser -- Who owns your archive? : historians and the challenge of intellectual property law / Gail Drakes -- The Berkeley compromise : oral history, human subjects, and the meaning of "research" / Martin Meeker -- The presence of the past : iconic moments and the politics of interviewing in Birmingham / Willoughby Anderson -- When radical feminism talks back : taking an ethnographic turn in the living past / Claire Bond Potter -- Do historians watch enough TV? : broadcast news as a primary source / David Greenberg -- Playing the past : the video game simulation as recent American history / Jeremy K. Saucier -- Eternal flames : the translingual imperative in the study of World War II memories / Alice Yang and Alan S. Christy -- When the present disrupts the past : narrating home care / Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein -- "Cult" knowledge : the challenges of studying new religious movements in America / Julius H. Bailey.

The very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has groen exponentially. From Walmart to disco and from Chavez to Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline.