This book is an intellectual and cultural account of the growth of history as an undergraduate discipline at Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century. History, the familiar centre of a broad Victorian consensus about God, country and good, provided the most consistent moral panorama able to satisfy a variety of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic needs. The book argues that history was taught in English universities in generally Whiggish ways to develop a sense of national duty and loyalty in students. These students were all part of an elite, and most were destined for the civil...

History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America examines the subjects, motives, and personal and intellectual origins of conservative historians who were also successful public intellectuals. In their search for a persuasive and wide appeal, conservatives depended until at least the 1960s upon history and historians to provide conservative concepts with authority and authenticity. Beginning with the Great War in Britain and the Second World War in America, conservative historians participated actively and influentially in debates about the heart, soul, and especially the mind of...