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The promise of opportunity drew twenty-seven-year-old Illinois schoolteacher William Winlock Miller west to the future Washington Territory in 1850. Like so many other Oregon Trail emigrants Miller arrived cash-poor and ambitious, but unlike most he fulfilled his grandest ambitions. By the time of his death in 1876, Miller had amassed one of the largest private fortunes in the territory and had used it creatively in developing the region’s assets, leaving a significant mark on the territory’s political and economic history. Appointed Surveyor of Customs at the newly created Port of Nisqually in 1851, Miller was the first federal official north of the Columbia River. Two years later he he...
William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.
William Miller was the founder of the modern American millennial tradition. Using various dates found in scripture, he sought to calculate the chronology of Christ's return to earth. Although his prediction that Christ would visibly return in 1843 failed spectacularly, followers reinterpreted his message and laid the basis for the modern Seventh-day Adventist Church. In this book, David L. Rowe utilizes the vast collection of Miller primary materials to reconstruct Miller's life. He relies on information found in correspondence. Rowe gives special attention to the Miller family connections and to Miller's personal identity struggles, documenting a deep tension between proclivities for both obedience and rebellion.
Provides a novel methodological approach to the study of popular and professional legal culture within the European context.
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