William Lee Miller, son of a peripatetic Presbyterian minister, grew up in Laramie, WY, Hutchinson, KS, and Lincoln, Nebraska. Miller earned a BA at the University of Nebraska, and a second BA from Yale Divinity School. He then joined Adali Stevenson's unsuccessful 1956 Presidential campaign, where he worked as a speech writer, he then returned to Yale, earning his Ph.D. from Yale in religious social ethics in 1958. He had a long career as a writer, scholar, and college professor. He taught from 1982-1999 in the University of Virginia religious studies department, where he was Commonwealth professor and Thomas C. Sorensen professor of political and social thought.
Miller was perhaps best known for books about Lincoln and slavery, including Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, 2002 and Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress, 1996. He also ventured into more modern history, with the book Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower and a Dangerous World, 2012 and a book about his own experiences serving as a three-term city Alderman in New Haven, The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 1966, among others.
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