Historian Edmund S. Morgan is the author of the 2002 best-seller Benjamin Franklin. He says his latest book, The Genuine Article, “amounts to an intellectual autobiography” of his scholarly career.

The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller (Belknap, $28). Miller made me take seriously the ideas of the New England Puritans, who looked at the world in a very different way from myself or anyone I knew. Writing with extraordinary clarity and resonance about a highly complex system of thought, Miller shows how compelling religious beliefs can be in determining human behavior at any time or place.

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