Above all though, Whig history is specifically English, which is why it is Whig history and not “progressive history” more generally. Hart’s Understanding Human History and Arthur Kemp’s March of the Titans: A History of the White Race - both attempts at writing a racially aware history targeted at white advocates - are very much Whiggish in the original sense. Hence, “What was Whig history” because I maintain it was a past-tense school of thought that no longer genuinely exists, and indeed many of its tropes were adopted by latter-day right-wing nationalists who didn’t even recognize its original pedigree and assumed that they were actually anti-Whiggish tropes, since the march of progress continued on with multiculturalism. Whig history was patriotic, nationalist, upheld a vision of parliamentary sovereignty and the common law tradition, and extolled the virtues of a primitive Anglo-Saxon liberty that either the Norman yoke crushed and then had to be revived (Macaulay’s view), or that it was a character trait so strong not even the Normans could extinguish (E.A. Although this is doubtlessly a common viewpoint, it does a disservice to actually understanding the 19th-century Whig historiographic tradition that Herbert Butterfield was reacting to in his famous 1931 essay (which he later repudiated, funnily enough) on The Whig Interpretation of History.
The “Whig interpretation of history” is all too often framed as the view that history follows a progressive arc from backwardness and superstition to liberty and equality, and hence with a set end goal that allows one to differentiate between a “right” and “wrong” side of history.
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