SOURCE: “The Historian,” in Churchill Revised: A Critical Assessment, The Dial Press, Inc., 1969, pp. 133-69.

In the following essay, Plumb presents an overview of Churchill's merits as a historian.

The baroque chimney stacks of Blenheim flaunt their grandeur against the sky, the final dramatic gesture of a palace that was always a monument and rarely a home. Achievements riotously carved in stone, obelisks of victory, sweeping columns, vista piled on vista create a sense of drama, of battle, of victory. There is no house like it in the Western world; and certainly not one in England that is dedicated so emphatically to one man—John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who decisively defeated the French armies of Louis XIV with a motley crew of Dutch, Germans, Danes, Scots, and a few regiments of the English. This great palace lies, therefore, at the heart of the Whig legend to that...