In one of the most celebrated historiography books of recent years, The Mirror of Herodotus (2009), a current member of Annales French historiographical movement, Franc¸ ois Hartog, asks whether Herodotus is to be regarded as an ethnographer or a historian. In fact, to Herodotus—a Greek historian from the 5th century BC, and considered the first historian ever—a historian is not a compiler of old documents, but a researcher who travels to form an opinion and collect testimonies regarding the recent past(Hartog, 2009).As other scholars have argued, “the Father of History is also the father of comparative anthropology” (Pipes, 1999), “the father of ethnography” (Jones, 1996, p. 315).

This stance on history was adopted by other historians from classical antiquity, such as Thucydides, who used oral surveys to collect data for his History of the Peloponnesian War, and by historians from the Middle Ages (Guenée, 1980) or the Enlightenment, like Voltaire (Soulet, 2012). Although it was Voltaire who said: “Over time, stories grow and the truth is lost” (quoted in Soulet, 2012, p. 14), from the nineteenth century onwards historiographical trends dealt more with the earliest times than the present.

However, it was the great psychological impact of the Second World War that triggered the boom in research into Recent history (also known as History of the Present or Contemporary History; in French: Histoire immediate), a term coined by the French historian Jean-Franc¸ ois Soulet (1994) to refer to the historiography of the present world.