ABSTRACT
The British historian Geoffrey Barraclough published his Introduction to Contemporary History in 1964. Effectively, he argued that “contemporary,” or “recent,” 2 history was a legitimate, indeed requisite, subject for the historian. In itself, this was a major break with more traditionally conceived historical practice, returning us to the Herodotean origins of the discipline. Of even greater importance was his forceful assertion that contemporary history marked a break with the “modern,” requiring the historian of the events of the last sixty to seventy years to take account of “underlying structural changes” (1). 3 In a bold act of prediction and analysis Barraclough sketched the outlines of global history avant la lettre. How prescient was he, in fact, and how well has his analysis held up? In revisiting Barraclough, we can gain renewed insight into our own “contemporary” history— that is, the events that have unfolded in the last half-century or so—as well as gain new ways of thinking about history.
