Entity | Perry Miller

Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller (February 25, 1905 – December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. 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. Heavy drinking led to his premature death at the age of fifty-eight. "Perry Miller was a great historian of Puritanism but the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability." Miller was born in 1905 Chicago, Illinois to Eben Perry Sturges Miller, M.D., from Mansfield, Ohio, and Sarah Gertrude Miller née Eddy, from Bellows Falls, Vermont. Eben Perry Sturges Miller appeared in 1895 and 1898 deacon's candidacy lists for Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Eben Perry Sturges received an 1898 "notice of discipline" for "abandonment or forfeiture of the Holy Orders" and "deposition" from the ministry, seven years before the birth of his son. The late nineteenth-century Episcopal Church of Illinois issued "notices of discipline" for cases of "moral delinquency," "doctrinal errors," and/or "sickness and infirmity."