Word: parrington
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...news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America...
Wolfe bolsters his argument with a little historical run-through, drawing some interesting parallels to 19th century society. He even cites social thinkers- Vernon L. Parrington, Wolfe identifies as "the literary historian," while managing to cite the triad of Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Kenneth Keniston in one of the sentences that follows- but more in the way of demonstrating his own brand of Academic Chic. (Wolfe took a doctorate in American Studies from Yale, and, like many a modern-day journalist, still yearns to justify his existence to the boys in the ivory tower he left behind...
...Your review of Richard Hofstadter's book [Oct. 25] gives a misleading impression of one of The Progressive Historians. I knew well and remember as a very great teacher Vernon Louis Parrington. From the review, one would judge that he never left the Middle West. In point of fact, he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the last 20 or more years of his mere 58 were spent as a professor at the University of Washington...
...PROGRESSIVE HISTORIANS, by Richard Hofstadter. A graceful and perceptive study of three men-Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and V. L. Parrington-who have most shaped America's conception of its past...
This kind of partisan polarity is as familiar to Americans as Sears Roebuck and peanut butter. But since World War II, modern scholarship has nitpicked Turner to death-on grounds of detailed inaccuracy and cloudy thinkng. Parrington has been buried by the New Criticism as a prejudiced bore and a square to boot-both of which he most emphatically was. Beard has not so much been demolished as deplored for his slighting of the non-economic complexities of history...