Word: parrington
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...exploitive American practices began to be the constant concern of a handful of historians. Their efforts and ideas form the background of this book by Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians tells the story of three men-Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington-who did the most to shape America's image of its history as a tapestry of continued progress. Part biography, part intellectual history, part scholarly polemic, the volume is a sharp but generous inquiry into the underlying conceptions of American history and the reasons for writing it. Hofstadter...
...American history-in 1893. Charles Beard created his most influential and controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. He had completed his most popular history. The Rise of American Civilization, by 1927, the year when an unknown English professor named V. L. Parrington published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Main Currents in American Thought. These men, writes Hofstadter, were the first "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment." And, he might have added, the issues of the moment endured...
They had much else in common. Born in the 1860s and early 1870s, brought up in the Midwest (Turner in Wisconsin, Beard in Indiana, Parrington in Kansas), all of them came of age at a time when the balance of power and influence was shifting from the effete East to the still raw and resentful Midwest. The financial panic of 1893 was in the making. The Populist movement was galvanizing Westerners and farm folk everywhere into a struggle against big money and big-city interests...
Compared with Beard or Turner, Parrington seems a somewhat perfunctory figure. In a series of interlocking biographical sketches-marked by Anglophobia and a gift for rhetoric-Parrington, in Main Currents in American Thought, reconstructed the U.S. cultural evolution. His notion, deeply ingrained in the American character, was that art should have a social purpose; realism, it followed, was better than fantasy. The great republic, he said, had solved through a struggle between the ideas of Good Guy liberals, dissenters, democrats and humanitarians, like Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, and naturally, Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Guy conservatives like Jonathan Edwards, Increase Mather...
...between '28 and '32, but the Party was never able to adapt itself to it. It was not simply that Marxism produced no literary criticism worth printing, though that was true enough; but even the social criticism of the American Left during the '30's came from men like Parrington, Beard, and Veblen, rather than from Marx. And Aaron's sketch of a figure like Edmund Wilson shows how the its ideology blinded the Party to the efforts o the few liberal thinkers consciously seeking to adapt Marx to America...