Perry Miller

From Philosopedia

Miller, Perry (25 February 1905 - 9 December 1963)

Miller, the eminent Chicago-born historian, did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and in 1931 received his Ph. D. there, after which he taught at Harvard from 1931 until his death.

A historian of ideas, Miller was a leading authority on American Puritanism. He wrote extensively, especially about colonial New England. In The New England Mind (1939), he argued that the Puritans had a coherent world view firmly rooted in theology and that religion rather than economics was the prime motive behind the settling of New England.

Alfred Kazin described him as "the master of American intellectual history."

Works

• 1933. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
• 1939. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
• 1949. Jonathan Edwards
• 1953. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
• 1956. Errand into the Wilderness
• 1957. The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry
• 1957. The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
• 1961. The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War
• 1965. Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War

Miller, a Unitarian, also wrote intellectual biographies of theologians Jonathan Edwards (1949) and Roger Williams (1953).

Criticism

David Brion Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winning author now the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, wrote about Miller:

The most brilliant and intellectually exciting teacher I ever had was Harvard’s great Perry Miller, whose final masterpiece, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, was published in 1965. I recently discovered that the index to this monumental work, highly acclaimed by the major historians of the time, has no entries for “slavery,” “Negro,” “slave trade,” “abolitionists,” “antislavery,” or any other topic referring to the central issue that divided the nation “from the Revolution to the Civil War.” And this was in 1965! No other example could dramatize so powerfully the way that Miller’s generation repressed and marginalized racial slavery in the New World.

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