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By Herbert Butterfield
A vintage essay at the distortions of heritage that happen while historians impose a inflexible perspective at the research of the past.
it isn't as effortless to appreciate the earlier as many that have written it's going to have us think. The historians who examine it from the Protestant, revolutionary, "19th Century gentleman" standpoint are outlined by way of Professor Butterfield as "the Whig historians." The Whig historian experiences the prior with regards to the current. He seems to be for company in historical past. And, in his look for origins and explanations, he can simply pick out these proof that supply aid to his thesis and hence dispose of different evidence both vital to the full photo.
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Extra info for The Whig Interpretation of History
Sample text
It would be the converse of the whig overdramatization. The deep movement that is in question does not explain everything, or anything at all. It does not exist apart from historical events and cannot be disentangled from them. Perhaps there is nothing the historian can do about it, except to know that it is there. One fallacy is to be avoided, and once again it is the converse of that of the whigs. If the Reformation is not merely a "cause", at the same time we cannot say that it is merely a "result".
All this is true, and it is certain that the real value of a piece of historical writing will come from the richness and fullness of the mind which the historian has brought to his work; but this is to say that such comments and such judgements are those of the historian himself; their value is the measure of his acuteness; their bias is the clue to the inclinations of his mind. They are not the judgements of history, they are the opinions of the historians. In other words, they are a personal matter, and one might say that they are subject to no law.
In this kind of discussion the loose thinker can achieve certainty and can reach judgements that have an air of finality, whereas a more scrupulous reflection would have much less to show for itself and might result only in tentativeness and doubt. Whatever value general history may have as a subject of popular study is greatly counterbalanced by the actual premium which it places in this way upon loose thinking. It engenders a pleasant exhilaration in the mind by reason of the facility with which it allows us to move over grand areas and exercise ourselves on momentous topics.