Sat May 13 11:54:42 EDT 2000
William N. Parker
Phillip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economics and Economic History
William Parker was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1919. He attended
Harvard College, received his B.A. in English in 1939, and commenced
graduate work in economics, only to leave Harvard for Washington in
the summer of 1941 to serve in the mobilization effort. He served in
the O.S.S. during the war and continued in government service until
1948, when he returned to Harvard to complete his graduate work.
After two years of research in France and Germany, he was awarded the
Ph.D. in 1951. Eleven years later, after teaching at Williams
College and the University of North Carolina, Parker came to Yale.
Bill Parker's work in economic history spans virtually the entire
range of issues connected with the emergence and development of
modern capitalist institutions in Europe and the United States. He
has written in detail and in broad perspective about agrarian
transformation, changes in the technology and organization of
manufacturing, the geographical extension of markets, and patterns of
regional development.
Professor Parker was among the first in his field to make systematic
use of quantitative data and statistical methods, compiling and
analyzing data from nineteenth century census manuscripts on U.S.
agricultural inputs and outputs. His landmark achievement was the
"Parker-Gallman sample" of 5,229 farms drawn from the U.S. manuscript
census of 1859. In collaboration with Robert E. Gallman (who died in
1998), the project received substantial funding from the National
Science Foundation, and entailed a painstaking "matching" process to
reunify information from three census schedules: Free Population,
Slave Population, and Agriculture. Designed to measure the extent of
inter-regional trade, the sample has been used for numerous other
purposes as well, such as testing hypotheses about the efficiency and
productivity of slave agriculture. The project is described in
William N. Parker (ed.), The Structure of the Cotton Economy in the
Antebellum South, published by the Agricultural History Society in
1970. As editor of the Journal of Economic History in the early
1960's, he presided over the flowering of quantitative research in
economic history. Yet he was a skeptical pioneer, cautioning others
in the field against excessive reliance on the use of quantitative
methods, insisting that the history of material life can only be
properly understood in the context of contemporaneous developments in
society, polity, and culture.
But it is as a teacher in the broadest sense that Bill Parker will be
remembered. When a group of his former students published a
Festschrift in his honor in 1984 (Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright,
eds., Technique, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern
Economies), they noted that "no other economic historian has so many
admirers and well-wishers." In his review, Lance Davis of the
California Institute of Technology called the volume "a superb
tribute to perhaps the most influential economic historian of the
postwar era." Parker called attention to his own legacy in the
preface to Europe, America and the Wider World, when he remarked that
his "five-foot shelf of great books" consisted of the works of his
"album full of Ph.D. students." As an indication of the regard in
which he is held by his former students, the Economic History
Association (which elected Parker as its president in 1969-70)
awarded him the Jonathan R. T. Hughes Prize for Excellence in
Teaching in 1995. As Director of Graduate Studies for eleven years,
he faced the challenge of interpreting the history of modern Western
institutions and has been unwavering in his commitment to free and
open discussion in the pursuit of knowledge and the governance of the
academy.
The family asks that contributions in honor of Bill be sent to:
William N. Parker Scholarship Fund
c/o Office of the President
Yale University
P.O. Box 208229
New Haven, CT 06520-8229
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://eh.net/pipermail/eh.news/attachments/20000513/3ba2f2b4/attachment.html