June 20, 2003

American Historians Would Do Well to Get Out of the Country

By RICHARD PELLS

In 1956, the great intellectual historian Perry Miller published Errand Into the Wilderness, a collection of dazzling essays about colonial and early-19th-century American thought. In his preface, Miller recalled his youthful "epiphany" while watching an apparently inexhaustible supply of American oil drums being unloaded in Africa. At that moment, struck by the "uniqueness of the American experience," he felt a "pressing necessity for expounding my America to the 20th century." That

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