Word: puritanize
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...errand into the scholarship of American history was perhaps as finally ambiguous as the earlier Puritan one, but it shared the same energy, and it expressed itself in a series of irreplacable books. Miller's abrupt inspiration on the banks of the Congo in 1926, what he called a "sudden epiphany," moved him--drove him, really--toward a surpassingly profound re-definition of the elusive American mind. In the process, in his New England "laboratory," he began to work out his own technique for the study of the history of ideas. As the legend grows, what he achieved...
Conner is a Kansan educated at the University of Nebraska. As a sculptor, he is represented at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. And as a filmmaker, he is no Puritan. His Cosmic Ray, four minutes long, is a collection of quick glimpses of photographically virgin (unairbrushed) nudes interspersed with scenes of naval engagements, Mickey Mouse, rocket planes, and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. One girl rides a broomstick, a witch without a stitch. Some seem to be twisting with the camera. One lies supine, her hands slipping off her panties...
...fratricidal Civil War. In St. Botolphs it is easier than it is in actual 20th century Quincy to see life as a system of divinely imposed sanctions, and to be aware that a nation founded by theological zealots ignores at its mortal peril the severe moral system of its Puritan progenitors...
Flawed Memories. The first Cheever in America was a Puritan schoolmaster who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for "his untiring abjuration of the devil" and who believed that "man is full of misery and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt." Cheever's mother and her parents emigrated from England, and, he says, "there was a certain air of shabby gentility about the whole thing. I hate to speak about the twilight of Athenian Boston and all that, but Cousin Randall would play two Beethoven sonatas after dinner, and everyone would sit around and belch...
...swings, dances, and shouts himself across the stage, waging some indefinite angry crusade, more bully than knight, but believable as both. The play itself is almost a twentieth-century Tom Jones, full of dark energy and strong life. This energy is what Teuber captures. "You're just an old Puritan at heart," his friend Cliff tells him. "Perhaps I am at that," he answers in a rare quiet moment. But that Puritan energy, that thrust toward suffering and feeling gives Jimmy's anger its direction. He wants to believe that there's "a kind of--burning virility of mind...