Background
Vernon Louis Parrington was born on 3 August 1871 at Aurora, Ilinois. His father was a school principal in New York and Illinois, served in the Union Army, and became a judge of probate in Kansas.
( When Parrington's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Ame...)
When Parrington's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of American ideas was first published, Henry Seidel Canby wrote, "This is a work of the first importance, lucid, comprehensive, accurate as sound scholarship should be, and also challenging, original in its thinking, shrewd, and sometimes brilliant." Alfred Kazin has called Main Currents in American Thought "the most ambitious single effort of the Progressive mind to understand itself." In the Foreword to this new edition, David W. Levy argues that Parrington's intellectual survey "will stand as a model for venturesome scholars for years to come. Readers and scholars of the rising generation may not follow Parrington's particular judgments or point of view, but it is hard to believe that they will not still be captivated and inspired by his sparkle, his breadth, his daring, and the ardor of his political commitment." Volume I, The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, treats such influential figures as John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Samuel Sewall, Increase and Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.
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(1927. Part Three of Three. The Beginnings of Critical Rea...)
1927. Part Three of Three. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America covers the period from 1860 to 1920. Introduces The Great Revolution: A New America in the Making: Rise of capitalistic industrialism submerging the older agrarianism, the Enlightenment, the Jacksonian frontier; Aristocracy Dead: The principle of democracy accepted, yet driving toward a plutocracy. A middle-class, urban civilization; Cleavages: Western agrarianism; Eastern capitalism. The South confused, bitter, hesitant. Expansion of the frontier and the cities. The swift extension of the psychology of the city; Changing Patterns of Thought: From the frontier came the doctrine of preemption, exploitation, progress; From the impact of science came the dissipation of the Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; From European proletarian philosophies came a new social theory; and Certain Drifts: to unity, to realism, to criticism. A wonderful account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American-how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our ideals and institutions. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. Other volumes in this set are ISBN(s): Part 1, 1417908157; Part 2, 1417908165.
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(Parrington is best remembered as the author of Main Curre...)
Parrington is best remembered as the author of Main Currents in American Thought, a politics-centered three-volume history of American letters from colonial times, postulating a sharp divide between the elitist Hamiltonian current and its populist Jeffersonian opponents, and making clear Parrington's own identification with the latter.
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Vernon Louis Parrington was born on 3 August 1871 at Aurora, Ilinois. His father was a school principal in New York and Illinois, served in the Union Army, and became a judge of probate in Kansas.
Parrington entered Harvard as a junior and graduated in 1893, after 2 years at the College of Emporia, a Presbyterian institution. His Harvard experience was not happy, and he afterward referred acidly to his eastern alma mater. Returning to the College of Emporia, he taught English and French while obtaining his master of arts degree. He also ran unsuccessfully for the school board on a "Citizen's" ticket.
Vernon early became acquainted with the sources of agrarian discontent, while growing up near Pumpkin Ridge, Kansas. He later recalled his bitter feelings at seeing a year's corn crop used for fuel.
In 1897 he was appointed instructor in English and modern languages at the University of Oklahoma, where he stayed for 11 years. Fired from his job in 1908 because of a "political cyclone, " Parrington accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Washington in Seattle.
There Parrington formed a close friendship with J. Allen Smith, a political scientist. His ideas profoundly affected Parrington, who later dedicated his book to Smith. Until 1927 Parrington wrote little: a chapter in the Cambridge History of American Literature, a few encyclopedia articles, an anthology, and some reviews.
In 1927 the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought, entitled The Colonial Mind and The Romantic Revolution in America, were published and received the Pulitzer Prize for history. The third volume, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, was incomplete when Parrington died on June 16, 1929, but was afterward published together with the earlier volumes in a one-volume edition.
Meaning of Main Currents Though Parrington used the subtitle "An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, " he denied writing "a history of American literature. " His true subject was the history of American liberalism, seen as a long struggle between freedom and individualism on the one hand and privilege and authoritarianism on the other. The roots of the struggle were always in economic relations, and literary productions were strategic elements in the fight.
For Parrington, writers embodied or exemplified some interest of an age, and each was considered in relation to his battle position.
In 1952 over 100 American historians rated Main Currents the most important work published in the field during the period 1920-1935. Yet its influence was relatively short-lived.
Parrington's judgments were in many instances revealed to be simply mistaken, and his conflict thesis began to be recognized as artificial and overly simplistic. Especially in the 1950, with the rise of a "consensus history" that stressed elements of basic agreement in the American tradition, Main Currents lost scholarly respect. Even with a renewed emphasis upon the place of social struggle in American history, it is unlikely that Parrington's interpretation will ever again appear plausible.
Many of Parrington's individual portraits remain unsurpassed, and his description of the post-Civil War national orgy of venality and vulgarity as the "Great Barbecue" has become classic.
(Parrington is best remembered as the author of Main Curre...)
( When Parrington's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Ame...)
(Examines the writings of John Winthrop, Roger Williams, C...)
(An assessment of the American Nobel Laureate whose work u...)
(1927. Part Three of Three. The Beginnings of Critical Rea...)
Parrington married Julia Rochester Williams in 1901. They had two daughters and a son.