2014 Reprint of 1954 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Perry G. E. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of this specialized area of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as the master of American intellectual history. In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans. This distinguished him from most previous historians, who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.