Vernon Louis Parrington (August 3, 1871 – June 16, 1929)[1] was an American literary historian, scholar, and college football coach.

He began his career teaching English and coaching football at the College of Emporia, which awarded him a master's degree in 1895 "for work completed 'in course.

He recalled in 1918, "With every passing year my radicalism draws fresh nourishment from large knowledge of the evils of private capitalism.

The elements that these pioneers considered revolutionary were Parrington's interdisciplinarity, consideration of cultural analysis, and a focus on the uniqueness of North America.

In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic."

His progressive interpretation of American history was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s and helped define modern liberalism in the United States.

"[11] Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his autobiography, says that the progressive histories of the 1920s such as Main Currents, "are little read and their authors largely forgotten."

Parrington reduced Jonathan Edwards, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James to marginal figures, practitioners of belles lettres, not illuminators of the American experience.

Meanwhile, historians shifted to a consensus model of the past that considered Parrington's dialectical polarity between liberal and conservative to be naive.