The great thing about being a historian is that you can write about almost anything and get away with it. Everything that happened in the past that left chronological records is fair game. If you’re really good, you can even fake the chronology.
Of course, most historians don’t write, once they get their Ph.D. degrees. They write term papers in college. They write longer term papers in graduate school. They write a Ph.D. dissertation. Then they stop writing.
There is another major problem with writing social history. Historians are specialists. They survive by being specialists. Yet there is no form of history that is broader than social history. It is distinctly a form of history in which specialization is a liability from the beginning. The mindset of the specialized historian is completely wrong for someone who wants to write the history of a particular society.
People can write fat histories of Western civilization because the timeline is so long, and the documentation is so varied. Somebody can read a dozen textbooks, get the general drift of what went on, and write one of his own. Maybe somebody will assign the textbook to college students, but probably not. Half a century ago, the best universities required at least a year’s course on the history of Western civilization. Today, virtually no university does. The student radicals of the late 1960’s got their way: “Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go.” About two dozen private colleges still teach it, but you have not heard of most of them. You probably have not heard of any of them.
THE CHALLENGE
How would you write a history of 20th century America? There were wars, and wars had influence for brief periods of time. But the war in Afghanistan has been…