Athletes - Vernon Louis Parrington

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	Athletes - Vernon Louis Parrington

Vernon Louis Parrington (1871–1929) was an American professor and author. He graduated from Harvard University in 1893, and later taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Washington.

Parrington is best 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 in 1928.

Parrington is also remembered as the second head coach of the University of Oklahoma football team, where he was the first OU faculty member to officially hold the position. He is credited with bringing a Harvard style of play and better organization to the OU football program. During his four year stretch from 1897 to 1900 Parrington's resource starved and inexperienced Oklahoma teams played only twelve games, but amassed a very respectable record of 9 wins, 2 losses and 1 tie. Parrington's span as head football coach was the longest of any of Oklahoma's first 5 coaches.

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