Roger Williams is best known as the founder of Rhode Island who was banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for his dangerous thoughts on religious liberty. But the city and colony Williams helped to found was deep in Native country situated between the powerful Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. The Williams that emerges from the documents in this collection is immersed in a dynamic world of Native politics, engaged in regional and trans-Atlantic debates and conversations about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, and situated at the crossroads of colonial outposts and powerful Native nations. Williams lived among and relied on the generosity of his Narragansett neighbors and yet he was a Native enslaver and part of a process that dispossessed regional Indigenous populations. He could establish a colony based on full religious freedom and yet bitterly complain and campaign against residents with whom he disagreed, such as Samuel Gorton or the Quakers. For the first time, Reading Roger Williams offers readers the opportunity to explore the many facets of Williams’s life by including selections from all of his writings, starting with his life in London and ending with one of his final letters, written when he was nearly eighty years old. Each document includes an introduction and annotations to help the reader better understand the text and context.
Om författaren
Linford D. Fisher is associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America and co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father. He is the principal investigator of the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project, which is a tribal community-centered collaborative project that seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time. Sheila M. Mc Intyre is associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Potsdam, and is the co-author of Correspondence of John Cotton, Jr, 1640-1699. Julie A. Fisher is an educator and historian of early America currently at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the U.S. National Archives. She has previously worked with the Yale Indian Papers Project, the National Park Service, the American Philosophical Society, and Bard High School Early College in Washington, DC. She is the co-author of Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country.
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