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14 JUNE 1919 * 29 APRIL 2000
ECONOMIC HISTORY lost an intellectual leader and one of its most inspiring teachers on 29 April 2000, when William N. Parker died in Hamden, Connecticut, after a lengthy illness. The field was doubly hit by the loss within a two-year span of Parker and his longtime friend and collaborator Bob Gallman, pioneers in the application of quantitative methods to economic history. The two were also beloved for their generosity and devotion to their students. At his last appearance at the Economic History Association meetings in September 1998, in Durham, North Carolina, Bill Parker spoke from a wheelchair and brought the crowd to its feet in a standing ovation.
William N. Parker was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1919. He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1939 with Richard Ruggles and James Tobin, later to become his colleagues in the Department of Economics at Yale University. Unlike his friends Ruggles and Tobin, Parker majored in English, a background that he always counted as one of his great assets as an economic historian. Much to their surprise, he switched to economics in graduate school, only to leave for the mobilization effort in Washington, in the summer of 1941. Parker served in the OSS 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 on coal and steel in France and Germany, Parker received his Ph.D. in 1951.
Only at that point did Bill Parker become an American economic historian, turning from mining and manufacturing to agricultural productivity and regional development. He taught at Williams College and the University of North Carolina before coming in 1963 to Yale University, where he later became the Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economics and Economic History. As co-editor (with Douglass North) of the JEH in the early 1960s, Parker presided over the flowering of quantitative research in economic history. He liked to joke that...