I have talked about this. One could write a lengthy book entitled The Varieties of Whig Historians.
Butterfield was a revisionist. I have referred to several others here, as well. I am not really familiar with most of them.
Bailyn I think would qualify. Namier, Palmer, Schroeder.
Ferguson sounds like it, at times. I am only familiar with a few.
Butterfield did not cite authorities, or even, for that matter, his critical targets, especially, in The Whig Interpretation, except people like Luther himself.
This lacuna was partially filled, much later, at least for the later centuries with which Butterfield had dealt, by J C D Clark, in English Society 1688-1832.
If you are a single issue historian, say womens, or black, or area studies, gender studies, various religious, economic, etc., history, and also a Whig historian, then you are already multiply hamstrung, going in.
I sense that Ferguson got, through a brute instinct for survival, a sixth sense that he needed to develop a broader understanding of what he was doing. He talked a little about that, in so many words, at the beginning of The Square and the Tower.
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