Or, to be more precise, he turned to the moment marked as an origin in a mostly forgotten text. In deciding that “the uniqueness of the American experience” was fundamentally Puritan, Miller turned to the precise origin of America-the founding of Boston in 1630 with the arrival of John Winthrop on the Arbella. Miller’s most lasting influence, however, came not from his overall study of the Puritans but from his assertions about one particular text. And because he began America with the Puritans-because he did so in such an original way and with such overwhelming force-he left in his wake a long train of scholars who took up the study of early New England with fresh interest, all of them re-envisioning Puritanism for the twentieth century. In graduate school, as Miller once recalled, “it seemed obvious that I had to commence with the Puritan migration.” The short prologue of his most widely read book, Errand into the Wilderness (1956), uses the words “begin,” “beginning,” “began,” “commence,” and “origin” fourteen times in three short pages, and almost all of those words applied directly to the Puritans. That self-understanding, for Perry Miller, started with the Puritans. of such a high order that they not only gave delight to those who appreciated the brilliance of his imaginative and searching intellect, but also contributed to the self-understanding of the whole American Nation.” Devoting himself to what he called “the meaning of America,” he tried to unravel its mystery and understand “America’s unending struggle to make herself intelligible.” After he died, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that “Miller’s historical labors were.
0 kommentar(er)
