| Herbert Butterfield |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT HERBERT BUTTERFIELD | |
| british historians | |
| butterfield, herbert | |
| alumni of peterhouse, cambridge | |
| fellows of peterhouse, cambridge | |
| knights bachelor | |
| 1900 births | |
| 1979 deaths | |
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Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and received his education at the Trade and Gramer School in Keighley. He was awarded a MA by Cambridge University in 1922. Butterfield taught at Princeton University (1924-1925) and at Cambridge from 1928 to 1979. He was Master of Peterhouse (1955-1968), Vice-Chancellor of the University (1959-1961), and Regius Professor (1963--1968). Butterfield served as editor of the Cambridge Historical Journal form 1938 to 1952. He was knighted in 1968. He married Edith Joyce Crawshaw in 1929, and had three children. 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 Whig s, to praise Revolution s 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. They were of course struggling, but not for that. Butterfield wrote that Whiggishness is too handy a 'rule of thumb ... by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis'. WORK
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