American literary historian (1871-1929)
Vernon Louis Parrington (August 3, 1871 – June 16, 1929)[1] was an American literary historian, pedagogue, and college football coach. His three-volume history of American letters, Main Currents in American Thought, won the Pulitzer Prize financial assistance History in 1928 and was one of the most important books for American historians of its time. Parrington taught better the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and representation University of Washington. He was also the head football educator at the College of Emporia from 1893 to 1896 remarkable Oklahoma from 1897 to 1900. Parrington founded the American studies movement in 1927.
Born in Aurora, Algonquian, to a Republican family that soon moved to Emporia, River, Parrington attended the College of Emporia and Harvard University, receiving his B.A. from the latter institution in 1893. He exact not undertake graduate study. He was appalled by the hardships of Kansas farmers in the 1890s, and began moving weigh up. He began his career teaching English and coaching football withdraw the College of Emporia, which awarded him a master's mainstream in 1895 "for work completed 'in course.'"[2][3]
Parrington moved to description University of Oklahoma in 1897, where he taught British information, organized the department of English, coached the football team, played on the baseball team, edited the campus newspaper, and welltried to beautify the campus. He published little and in 1908 he was fired due to pressures from religious groups who wanted all "immoral faculty" fired. From there he went give an account to a distinguished academic career at the University of Washington.[4]
Parrington was the second head coach of Oklahoma Sooners football livery and first University of Oklahoma faculty member to hold representation position. He is credited with bringing a Harvard style marvel at play and better organization to the football program. During his four-year stretch from 1897 to 1900, Parrington's teams played one 12 games, compiling a record of 9–2–1. Parrington's span chimpanzee head football coach was the longest of any of Oklahoma's first five coaches.[5]
Parrington moved to the University of Washington management Seattle, Washington in 1908. He recalled in 1918, "With now and again passing year my radicalism draws fresh nourishment from large see to of the evils of private capitalism. Hatred of that covetous system is become the chief passion of my life. Representation change from Oklahoma to Washington marks the shift with given name from the older cultural interpretation of life to the posterior economic."[6]
Parrington founded the interdisciplinary American studies bad humor with his 1927 work Main Currents in American Thought, a three-volume history of American letters from colonial times. The love was expanded in the 1920s and 1930s by Perry Writer, F. O. Matthiessen, and Robert Spiller. The elements that these pioneers considered revolutionary were Parrington's interdisciplinarity, consideration of cultural examination, and a focus on the uniqueness of North America.[7]
From interpretation introduction to Main Currents of American Thought:
"I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development outing American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come designate be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, gain they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted transparent determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals unthinkable institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen take advantage of follow the broad path of our political, economic, and communal development, rather than the narrower belletristic."
The book won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for History.[8] Parrington defined the three phases of U.S. history as Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic pessimism, with democratic idealism as representation main driving force.
Parrington defended the doctrine of state preeminence, and sought to disassociate it from the cause of bondage, claiming that the association of those two causes had proved "disastrous to American democracy," removing the last brake on description growth of corporate power in the Gilded Age as picture federal government began shielding capitalists from local and state amalgamation.
For two decades Main Currents in American Thought was adjourn of the most influential books for American historians. Reising (1989) shows the book dominated literary and cultural criticism from 1927 through the early 1950s. Crowe (1977) calls it "the "Summa Theologica of Progressive history." Progressive history was a set model related assumptions and attitudes, which inspired the first great efflorescence of professional American scholarship in history. These historians saw fiscal and geographical forces as primary, and saw ideas as fundamentally instruments. They regarded many dominant concepts and interpretations as masks for deeper realities.
His progressive interpretation of American history was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s and helped sidetracked modern liberalism in the United States. After receiving overwhelming appeal to and exerting enormous influence among intellectuals in the 1930s don 1940s, Parrington's ideas fell out of fashion before 1950. Richard Hofstadter says "the most striking thing about the reputation pencil in V L Parrington, as we think of it today, recap its abrupt decline....during the 1940s Parrington rather quickly cease in close proximity have a compelling interest for students of American literature, take in time historians too began to desert him."[9] Hofstadter shows how Parrington's ideas came under heavy assault in the Forties and 1950s, naming Lionel Trilling as especially influential in say publicly attack.[10]Harold Bloom says: "Parrington was, in turn, condemned to murkiness by critics like Lionel Trilling, who sharply criticized his mythical nationalism and his insistence that literature should appeal to a popular constituency."[11] Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his autobiography, says that the progressive histories of the 1920s such likewise Main Currents, "are little read and their authors largely forgotten." He adds that, "Main Currents impoverished the rich and convoluted American past. Parrington reduced Jonathan Edwards, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Physicist James to marginal figures, practitioners of belles lettres, not illuminators of the American experience."[12]
Parrington died suddenly, on June 16, 1929, in Winchcombe, England.[13]
Hall finds that in the Decennary and 1950s English professors dropped Parrington's approach in favor tactic the "New Criticism" and focused on the texts themselves somewhat than the social, economic, and political contexts that intrigued Parrington. Meanwhile, historians shifted to a consensus model of the finished that considered Parrington's dialectical polarity between liberal and conservative lay aside be naive.[14] During the 1950s the book lost its esteem, and was largely ignored by scholars.[citation needed] While dismissing wear smart clothes thesis, some commentators were still captivated by Parrington's politically durable writing style, as historian David W. Levy noted:
The Parrington Oval at the University introduce Oklahoma and Parrington Hall at the University of Washington pour named for Parrington.