[1] Miller specialized in the history of early America and took an active role in a revisionist view of the colonial Puritan theocracy that was cultivated at Harvard University beginning in the 1920s.
[3] His father appeared in the deacon's candidacy lists for Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1895 and 1898,[4] but he also received a "notice of discipline" for "abandonment or forfeiture of the Holy Orders" and "deposition" from the 1898 ministry.
[5] The late 19th-century Episcopal Church of Illinois commonly issued notices of discipline for cases of "moral delinquency," "doctrinal errors," and "sickness and infirmity."
[7] In a 1956 preface to the Errand into the Wilderness collection, Perry Miller disclosed that, along the shores of the Congo River, he had decided to pursue the intellectual history of Puritanism.
Miller acknowledged that "the adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany (if the word be not too strong) of the pressing necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century."
Thus "it was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America."
In 1942, Miller resigned his post at Harvard to join the United States Army and was stationed in Great Britain for the duration of World War II, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services.
In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.
"[20] Especially within the Harvard community, "his death was mourned as a loss to the intellectual landscape in the U.S."[21] The Congo River "epiphany" from Perry Miller's early life produced much posthumous scrutiny by scholars and media outlets.
"[28] American Studies specialist Paul Lauter has written and lectured on formulating pedagogical approaches to Perry Miller's "epiphany" in the Congo.
I tried to deflect attention from Miller's psychology and toward the implications of the narrative for the early shape of American Studies...the discussion led us to apply Jameson's rubric---'always historicize'...examining Miller in this way enabled us to understand how what we designated as 'American Studies' was not fixed by history into a particular profile but like other phenomenon was historically rooted in the starting points particular scholars in particular circumstances at particular times might recognize as different.