Vernon Louis Parrington

Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929) graduated from Harvard University in 1893, later taught at Oklahoma University and the University of Washington in Seattle.

Parrington is remembered as the author of Main Currents in American Thought , a politics-centered look at 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.

Parrington defended the doctrine of state sovereignty, and sought to disassociate that from the cause of slavery. He wrote that the association of those two causes had proven "disastrous to American democracy," removing the last brake on the growth of corporate power, because in the gilded age the federal government had shielded capitalists from local and state regulation.

Main Currents won the Pulitzer Prize in History, 1928.