In this reading, British history was the victim of the culture wars in the American and Canadian academies, which had branded British history as that of DWM (Dead White Men) and encouraged history departments to replace historians of Britain with those of other parts of the world. The report's (Stansky Report) prescription for this malaise was for British historians to take an imperial turn that acknowledged the contagious and exploitive presence of empire. This is now the orthodoxy of the field in the United States, where the history of imperial Britain has new resonance as America has increasingly trodden in the shadows of the British Empire by intervening in the very regions once colonized by Britain. All of a sudden, whether one is a champion or critic (and *there are* champions who have suggested that America can learn from Britain's imperial example!), the story of the rise and fall of the world's first modern imperial superpower looks uncannily relevant.
... The relatively new fields of ‘Big’ and ‘World’ or ‘Global’ history have dramatically expanded the chorological and geographical range and explanatory scale of the discipline. Yet they have done so by raising troubling intellectual and institutional questions about the extent to which they obscure the specificity of particular national histories, the capacity to teach them, and the ability to do research in their own language. Why hire a historian of China, India, Brazil or Russia, let alone an ancient, medieval, early modern or modern historian when a World or Big historian would do? Indeed, for Bill Gates, a prominent supporter of Big History and the move to remote online models of education, one imagines a single MOOC on History would suffice! 引自 Preface
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