Dr. David Parker Biography |
| Welcome to my Kennesaw Faculty Page! I've been in the Department of History and Philosophy at KSU since 1993. My philosophy is, "No one gets out of my class awake." My research interests and scholarly pursuits include Northwest Georgia history & culture. One of my favorite local subjects is Bill Arp, an essayist and humorist from Cartersville (where I live), popular in the late nineteenth century. I've also written about evangelist Sam Jones, another Cartersville figure. A few years ago, I got interested in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. You can also reach these pages by visiting David Parker's Page in History. Of my professional service activities, I'm especially proud of my association with Dr. George Tindall's America: A Narrative History, one of the most popular college-level US History textbooks; I wrote eight editions of the Instructor's Manual that accompanied it. For a more complete (but boring) list of my academic activities, you may visit my vita. (A vita, in academic circles, is a resume.) As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, I was drawn through my work in southern history (under the direction of George B. Tindall) to consider the ramifications of the southern identity in the decades after the Civil War. I was especially interested in how post-war southerners dealt with the program of industrial progress known as the "New South": while industrialization brought a measure of prosperity to the region, many southerners, especially those who had reached adulthood before the war, worried that such modernizing trends threatened what they perceived as the South's values and virtues.These fears and frustrations of Old Southerners living in the New South became the thesis of my doctoral dissertation on Charles Henry Smith, the Georgia essayist and humorist who wrote under the penname "Bill Arp." Bill Arp's weekly column in the Atlanta Constitution (1878-1903), syndicated in hundreds of southern newspapers, made him perhaps the South's most popular writer a century ago. When the dissertation was published by the University of Georgia Press as Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "Goodly Heritage", I suggested in the final chapter a reason for Arp's popularity: The world of Arp's homely philosophy was one filled with honest and industrious people who lived in the country and in small towns and who cared more for their families and fellow men than for wealth, power, or the fashions of society.... Arp thought, wrote, and talked about the past as a way of dealing with the wrongs of the present, and his popularity suggests that his weekly letter was a balm for other southerners as well, soothing the pain of irretrievable loss that they shared with him. I haven't forgotten Bill Arp. He has been very important to me, both professionally and personally. It was he who first brought us to Northwest Georgia almost a dozen years ago, for a research trip when I was finishing up the dissertation. We live in an old house in Cartersville now, about three blocks from where Bill Arp lived, and my association with him is what folks in Bartow County know about me.I've had the chance to share my research with a number of local groups--the Cartersville's Exchange Club, the Stilesboro Improvement Club, the "Southern Voices" program of the 83rd Annual Stilesboro Chrysanthemum Show, the Cedartown Kiwanis Club, the Etowah Valley Historical Society, the Cartersville Rotary Club, and the Etowah Family Tree Climbers, and others. Atlanta Constitution columnist Bill Osinski wrote a couple columns on me and Bill Arp, and my contribution to the "Georgia Minute" syndicated radio program (on Arp) recently appeared on a "Best of Georgia Minute" cassette. I hope to do one more big Arp project: a collection of his "homely philosophy" writings, which people find as delightful today as they did a century ago.While researching Bill Arp, I kept running into Sam Jones, the famous Methodist evangelist who was a friend and neighbor of Arp's. I realized that Jones's religious message stemmed largely from the same concerns with the new age of the late-nineteenth-century South about which Bill Arp was writing in his columns. The result of my investigation into Jones was an article in the Georgia Historical Quarterly--"'Quit Your Meanness': Sam Jones's Theology for the New South"--and a new appreciation of the significance of religion for understanding the society and culture of a particular time and place. |