ABSTRACT
William Nelson Parker was Phillip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economics and Economic History, Emeritus, and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1919 and died in Hamden, Connecticut in 2000. He was educated at Harvard (A.B., 1939; M.A., 1941; Ph.D., 1951). During and after World War II he worked at the Office of Production Management, the Office of Strategic Services, the US Senate and the Department of State. He began his teaching career at Williams College (1951-6), continuing at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1956-62) and then at Yale from 1962, retiring in 1989. Parker was Editor (with Douglass North) of the Journal of Economic History (1961-6), President of the Economic History Association (1969-70) and of the Agricultural History Association (1979-80), and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1987. He was honored in 1984 with Technique, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern Economies, a Festschrift edited by Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright.
