Miller, Perry

Related Category: Historians, U.S.: Biographies

1905–63, U.S. historian, b. Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Chicago in 1931 and taught at Harvard from 1931 until his death. A towering figure in the field of American intellectual history, Miller 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. Miller's work stimulated a renewed interest in American Puritanism. His other books include Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933), From Colony to Province (1953), Errand into the Wilderness (1956), The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (repr. 1982), and intellectual biographies of Jonathan Edwards (1949) and Roger Williams (1953).