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Although William Miller and his followers captured the attention of much of the United States in the 1840s with their prediction that Christ would come in 1843-44, it has taken considerable time for scholars to appreciate their historical significance.Appearing to many of their contemporaries as fanatics and dupes for fraudulent leaders, the Millerites seemed to stand outside mainstream American culture.This image of Millerism as an American oddity shaped virtually all subsequent writing on the movement.Millerite historiography has passed basically through three periods.The first of these, which consisted largely of memoirs by the movement's participants, who sought to defend their beliefs and actions, began in the mid-nineteenth century and extended to the early twentieth.Then, during the first half of the new century, major secondary works appeared, based on research but framed primarily as a debate between detractors and apologists for the movement.While a few historians had given the Millerites attention previously, after 1950 an academic interest in the movement grew slowly, reaching a high point in the 1980s.This academic phase built upon the previous writing, but rather than attacking or defending the Millerites it analyzed their relationship to American society.By the mid-1990s scholars were no longer viewing Miller and his followers as fanatics.Instead, they were more precisely defining the similarities and differences between the Millerites and the nineteenth-century American culture of which they were a part.'This article appears as an introduction to Everett N. Dick, William Miller and the Advent Crises 1831-1844, with a Foreword and Historiographical Essay by Gary Land (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, Oct. 1994, xxviii + 221 pp.).Land's essay treats all major published and unpublished works on the Millerite Movement.Dick's work is reviewed elsewhere in this issue of AUSS, as is another recent publication on the Millerites, G. R. Knight's Millennial Fever and the End of the World.*Sylvester Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller Generally Known as a Lectwrer on the Prophecies, and the Second Coming of Christ (Boston: Joshua V .Hirnes, 1853), iv.3James White, Sketches of the Christian L$e and Public Labors of William Miller, Gatherd From His Memoir by the Late Sylvester Bliss and From Other Sources by James White (Battle Creek: Steam
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