Sir Herbert Butterfield

Historian, born in Yorkshire, N England, UK. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he later became fellow (1923–55) and master (1955–68), as well as lecturer (1930–44), professor of modern history (1944–63), and Regius professor (1963–8). He won initial recognition as a diplomatic historian with The Peace-Tactics of Napoleon 1806–8 (1929). His The Origins of Modern Science (1949) inaugurated the worldwide development of the history of science.

Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).

Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and received his education at the Trade and Grammar School in Keighley.

Butterfield's main interests were diplomatic history and historiography. As a Protestant, Butterfield was highly concerned with religious issues, but he did not believe that historians could uncover the hand of God in history.

In The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield defined "whiggish" history as "the tendency of many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."

He had in mind especially the historians of his own country, but his criticism of the retroactive creation of a line of progression toward the glorious present can be, and has subsequently been, applied more generally.

He found Whiggish history objectionable because it warps the past to see it in terms of the issues of the present, to squeeze the contending forces of, say, the mid-seventeenth century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or the imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves.

Butterfield wrote that Whiggishness is too handy a 'rule of thumb ... The Peace Treaties of Napoleon, 1806-1808, 1929. The Whig Interpretation of History, 1931. The Englishman and His History, 1944. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, 1949. Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship, 1955. Moral Judgments in History, 1959. The Origins of History, ed.