The books linked below are possibly useful for Lovecraft scholars interested in the ‘deep local’ intellectual background to Lovecraft, beyond the topography, architecture and places. They form a beautifully written intellectual history of early New England, and thus outline ideas Lovecraft would have been very familiar with — even if he rejected parts of such ideas…

The New England Mind: From Colony To Province.

The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.

Apparently the two books were written in reverse order, but read together they tell the intellectual story from the founding of the colony onward. Despite the rather dry appearance of their contents pages, they are one of the most readable accounts of the thinking of the period, and the author was hailed by his fellows as an “artist” of history writing. The works endured. In 1982 American History remarked, noting that the books had stood the test of time and attempts to tear them down, that …

IT HAS BECOME COMMON TO SPEAK OF PERRY MILLER [author of the above books] AS AN ARTIST. BUT in the past few decades the idea that history is a literary art has dropped [away…]

They’re free on Archive.org.