Vernon louis parrington biography of donald

-- Vernon Louis Parrington

THE FIELD AT THE FAIRGROUNDS in Guthrie, the capital of the Oklahoma Territory, was frozen but free of snow for the kickoff of the big college football game on New Year's Eve 1897. The contest, which was actually the prelude to the day's main event, the Territorial Intercollegiate Oratorical Contest, pitted the University of Oklahoma against another Oklahoma school, Kingfisher College.

It was the fledgling University of Oklahoma football team's first game that far from home, and during the early part of the contest they had some tough sledding. Oklahoma end Bill McCutcheon was being punished particularly hard by a heavy-set Kingfisher tackle. "He hurt me every time he hit me," McCutcheon recalled later. Closer inspection revealed that McCutcheon's opponent was wearing armor: Beneath his jersey he had concealed an elbow of stovepipe over each shoulder and arm.

Although McCutcheon's opponent was forced to shed his extra gear, Kingfisher continued to dominate Oklahoma, and carried an 8-6 lead to the bench at halftime. There is no record of what the Oklahoma coach told his beleaguered team as they warmed themselves during the break, but its results were evident during the second half in classic college football fashion. The Oklahoma offense came alive, eating up the field with plays that called for the tackles and ends to cross-block their opposite numbers while the ball carrier swung through the gap boosted by supporting backs, for in those days football offenses relied as much on pushing from behind as blocking in front.

Midway through the second half, the game was interrupted by the Logan County sheriff, who had never seen a footba

By Andrew McGregor

Football found its way to Oklahoma during the 1890s. The game flowed naturally into the Sooner state, invading its borders like the schooners that raced in during the land rush. Students at the fledgling territorial university took up the activity alongside baseball, with the encouragement of chemistry professor Edwin DeBarr, when the school opened its doors in 1892. Informal scrimmages confined to the borders of campus typified the early game. DeBarr, who had competed at Michigan, seemed to be more interested in baseball, leaving the football squad without a coach. Instead, Jack Harts, a transfer student from Winfield, Kansas who had experience playing football, led the efforts to organize the team and schedule their first game in 1895. The brand new Sooner football team got off to an inauspicious start, suffering an embarrassing 34-0 defeat to an Oklahoma City town team. The following year, despite losing Harts and still not having a coach, the team won both of its games against Norman High School. Sooners football was on the rise.[1]

Football morphed into a formalized campus institution following the arrival of Vernon Louis Parringtonat the University of Oklahoma in 1897. Hired to develop a department of English for the young university, he took on the added unpaid roles of football coach and athletic director. The extra duties were no bother to Parrington, who, like many of the leading Progressive thinkers of the day, viewed sport as an important part of training complete men.[2] Football also played an important role in establishing a university culture. Parrington was intimately tied to both at Oklahoma.

Parrington, who is perhaps best remembered as one of the founders of American Studies, winner of the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for History, and one of Richard Hofstadter’s “Progressive Historians,” embodied Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life.”[3] He modeled a form of robust yet genteel masculinity, representing the

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 calledMain Currents in American Thought"the most ambitious single effort of the Progressive mind to understand itself."

Three Volumes in One Book - 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.

In Volume II, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800 - 1860, Parrington treats such influential figures as John Marshall, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Volume 3 - The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920