After reading history at Oxford University, Parkes came to the United States to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1929 and joined the history faculty of New York University in 1930. He had also lectured at Barnard College, the University of Wyoming, the New School for Social Research and the University of Washington. From 1956 to 1957, Parkes was a Fulbright Fellow, working at the University of Athens in Greece.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1930). Jonathan Edwards, the Fiery Puritan. New York: Minton, Balch & Company. p. 271 pp.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1938). A History of Mexico. Houghton Mifflin.
  Note: a third edition was published in 1960.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1939). Marxism: An Autopsy.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1942). The Pragmatic Test.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1942). Recent America.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1942). The World After War.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1947). The American Experience.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1953). The United States of America.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1959). Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture. New York: Vintage Books. p. 489 pp.

• Parkes, Henry Bamford (1969). The Divine Order: Western Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Knopf. p. 480 pp.

• "Constructive Anatomy". Time. 23 October 1939. Archived from the original on 8 March 2008.
  A review of Marxism: An Autopsy that appeared in Time magazine.

• Henry Bamford Parkes' obituary