From Belloc to Churchill
Subtitle: private scholars, public culture, and the crisis of British liberalism, 1900-1939
By: Victor Feske.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
Subjects: Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874-1965; Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953; Historiography -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century; Liberalism -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century; Great Britain -- Historiography -- History -- 20th century; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1901-1936; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
Description: Linking historiography and political history, Victor Feske addresses the changing role of national histories written in early twentieth-century Britain by amateur scholars Hilaire Belloc, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, G.M. Trevelyan, and Winston Churchill. These writers recast the nineteenth-century interpretation of British history at a time when both the nature of historical writing and the fortunes of Liberalism had begun to change. Before 1900, amateur historians writing for a wide public readership portrayed British history as a grand story of progress achieved through constitutional development. This "Whig" interpretation had become the cornerstone of Liberal party politics. But the decline of Liberalism as a political force after the turn of the century, coupled with the rise of professional history written by academics and based on archival research, inspired change among a new generation of Liberal historians. The result was a refashioned Whig historiography, stripped of overt connections to contemporary political Liberalism, that attempted to preserve the general outlines of the traditional Whiggist narrative within the context of a broad history of consensus. This new formulation, says Feske, was more suited to the intellectual and political climate of the twentieth century. - Publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.