PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS DRIVER
PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS SERIES

I generally found that the closer one got to the present, the scholarship became less rigorous and the writing more casual. The more of a modernist I became, the more intrigued I was by Miller and the more entranced by the speculation as to what pragmatism, for example, might look like if it were a topic addressed by someone trained as a medievalist (I eventually tried my hand at exactly such an essay, pointedly entitled “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History”).

Although I first read Miller while expecting to specialize in 18 th century American history, I read for exams in the modern period, too, and soon switched to the 20 th century as my own specialty. I knew I did not want to switch from American to medieval history, but I did feel that the medievalists were comfortable with a more austere analytic style than what I discerned in the bulk of specialists in American history, especially in the more recent periods. The articles I read in Speculum and English Historical Review seemed to me more sophisticated and focused than the ones I read in Mississippi Valley Historical Review and later in Journal of American History. Medievalists kept talking about “advanced problems” in the field, a language I don’t recall ever hearing in a US history seminar. As a graduate student in American history with a minor in medieval England, I was struck with how vastly different were the styles of history in these two fields as registered, at least, by the books and articles I was expected to read. I came to appreciate Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness while trying to imagine what 20 th century US history might look like if it were written by a medievalist.

PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS SERIES

Classics Series Editor, Lilian Calles Barger. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did bringing it together. My hope is that the classics series will provide a fresh reading of some of the books that have influenced our field and insight into the development of historical thinking. The results will be seen in the coming months as each writer takes a unique approach from the personal to the historiographical. When I asked senior scholars to name a book that had shaped their thinking often times it wasn’t on the list, or even U.S. We began with a list compiled by the book review committee a list fit for a field examination. The series is motivated by the desire to put our current work in the context of what has stood the test of time.

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.Our “Classic Series” of retrospective reviews and reflections provides an opportunity to invite senior scholars and others to take a look back at books that have either endured, or had particular significant in their intellectual growth.

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 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.

Perry miller errand into the wilderness