Making Hay (review of The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, by Kenneth Stampp)

MAKING HAY

When Perry Miller was a young graduate student seeking his intellectual fortune, he was given some fatherly advice by a University of Chicago scholar. “All the hay of New England Puritanism has been threshed,” he was told. He would wreck his career, “even before it commenced, crawling through the dry stubble to pick up stray gleanings.” But Miller persevered, plowed up the old ground, and made a crop.