Thomas Kuhn’s conception of paradigms has proved tremendously popular with the social sciences, in spite of the fact that Kuhn himself stopped using the concept by the time of his death; and the idea has come in for some fairly harsh treatment by philosophers of science. In this article I examine the historiography of the Second World War, paying specific attention to internal and external mechanisms of maintaining consensus – or lack therefore – within the field to see if anything (...) like paradigms can be said to exist in historical writing. (shrink)