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“It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle in central Africa,” Miller wrote in 1956, “to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States….” Back in graduate school, Miller began his search for the “drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America,” in the Puritan migration from Europe to North America. Miller attributes his decision to study 17th-century New England Puritanism-despite his professor’s warnings that the field had been exhausted-to an “epiphany” he experienced as a young man while hunting adventure on the banks of the Congo River. While most of Perry Miller’s nearly 2,500-item collection resides in the Bertha and Jacob Goldfarb University Library, Archives and Special Collections houses a small portion of about 200 rare and first-edition books that have significant historic and literary value.īorn in Chicago, 1905, Miller received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1928 before beginning graduate work in American Literature at Harvard in 1931. Brandeis University acquired the collection in the fall of 1964 from Miller’s widow, Elizabeth Miller. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department holds an extensive collection of 17th- and 18th-century works of religion, history and law as part of the personal library of the late Harvard University Professor Perry Miller, who died December 9, 1963. Perry Miller Collection on the Colonial Religious Experience in Americaĭescription by Alexandra Wagner Lough, Archives and Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in history
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PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS PROFESSIONAL
Graduate Professional Studies (Online Programs) Rabb School: Graduate Professional Studies Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team.Heller School for Social Policy and Management Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s.
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PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS DRIVER
By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.Īllison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA(U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency.