Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) was an English historian and philosopher of history (see philosophy of history) who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled The Whig Interpretation of History 1931.

In this volume, 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. They were of course struggling, but not for that.

Whiggishness is a too handy

rule of thumb ... by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis,

Butterfield wrote.