ABSTRACT
In late 1924 Vernon Louis Parrington received an invitation from Louis Straus to teach in the coming summer session at Ann Arbor. The 1925–26 academic year was the annus mirabilis, for Parrington brought the course title into congruence with his methods and content and changed it to History of American Culture. The university president, Glenn Frank, had evidently received from Carl Van Doren details regarding Parrington’s forthcoming publication and in mid-1926 began urging him to help create a proposed faculty of outstanding scholars in English and American literature. In April 1927, when Parrington was fifty-five years old, the first two volumes of Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 appeared in print. The currents imagery may reflect a linear, teleological interpretation of the past—the interpretation that the Progressive historians, including Parrington, have been judged as promoting.
