“The most original historian of his generation” That is how the
celebrated British academic Noel Annan described Herbert
Butterfield (1900–1979), a profound and prolific writer who made
important contributions as both a public and academic historian.
In this authoritative and accessible intellectual biography,
Kenneth B. McIntyre explores the extraordinary range of
Butterfield’s work. He shows why the small book The Whig
Interpretation of History (1931) achieved such large influence;
Butterfield, he demonstrates, has profoundly shaped American and
European historiography by highlighting the distortions that
occur when historians interpret the past merely as steps along
the way toward the glorious present. But McIntyre delves much
deeper, examining everything from Butterfield’s lectures on
history, historiography, and Christianity, to his warnings about
the dangers of hubris in international affairs, to his essays on
the origins of modern science, which basically created the
modern discipline of the history of