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The New England Mind: From Colony to Province

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A week before I was to take my comprehensive exams for my Ph.D. in history, my advisor asked me to name the three great historians of colonial American whose names began with "M." I sputtered for moment and made no serious answer, in part because of the trivial nature of the question, but he wanted me to say Edmund S. Morgan, Samuel Elliot Morison, and Perry Miller. No question about it, Perry Miller (1905-1963) was one of the most important of the consensus historians of the middle part of the twentieth century and his work on the American Puritans was required reading for all students of history when I attended graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "The New England Mind: From Colony to Province" (1953) was one of his masterworks, exploring the intellectual history of the Puritans through a deep investigation of the thought of the Puritan divines. In this book, as well as its predecessor "The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century" (New York: Macmillan Company, 1939), Miller asserted a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.

Miller also described a terrifying "declension" experienced by the Puritans which, he asserted, resulted from the "apostasy, ingratitude, and corruption" of their too well off children who did not understand the struggles of their forefathers and did not appreciate their sacrifices in bringing them to a new land of plenty where they might live their lives in the spirit of a covenant with God (p. 482). The demise of the intellectual position of the early Puritans disturbed Miller, who searched for order among the thought of its best minds. Instead, he found a terrifying dissension that rejected that earlier consensus. As Miller put it, at the time that the revolutionary generation was being born in the 1730s "reality--all the complex, jostling reality of this anxious society--demanded new descriptions" to make sense of the world (p. 485).

As in all works by Miller, America was very much one nation and one people, but in this book he describes an unsettled people and nation troubled by its place in the world and its own self-image. A search for identity ensued, and for Miller that was a never ending quest. This book, a product of the consensus historical construct of the middle part of the twentieth century--which emphasized common intellectual beliefs over conflicting self-interest--remains an imposing work. It is involved reading with its emphasis on the elite thinkers of Puritan New England, but the depth of investigation and the breadth of detail is impressive. Few would read either this volume, or its prequel, at the beach, but for those seeking to understand the history of Puritanism it is invaluable.

A classic examination of the early American intellectual life. All serious students and scholars of American literature and history must read this book.