Reading Roger Williams
Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America—a Documentary History
by Linford D. Fisher, Sheila M. McIntyre and Julie A. Fisher
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
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. McIntyre 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.
“Roger Williams is well-known for his insistence on religious freedom. This careful, intelligent anthology highlights another major aspect of his long life as writer, activist, and citizen in New England, his understanding of local Native Americans, and his relationship to the policies—endorsed (or criticized)—of his fellow colonists towards those people. Filled with unexpected evidence at every turn!”
—David D. Hall, professor of New England church history emeritus, Harvard Divinity School
“Who was Roger Williams? You will learn to know him in this carefully curated collection both as a radical puritan who worked for the liberty of conscience as he understood it, and as a self-proclaimed ‘friend of the Indians’ who joined in the settler colonial conquest of Narragansetts, Pequots, and other Native peoples. This is an essential guide to Williams and to the contradictions and cruelties of the seventeenth-century English colonial world.”
—Tisa Wenger, professor of American religious history, Yale Divinity School
“Reading Roger Williams is no mere compilation of an icon’s works. Drawing on the best recent scholarship and placing carefully selected excerpts of Williams’s public and private writings alongside the words of his contemporaries, the authors embed a very human Williams in rich historical contexts. Readers hoping to understand the religious, political, and personal underpinnings of English attempts to colonize Indigenous America can find no better guide on their journey.”
—Daniel K. Richter, professor emeritus of American history, University of Pennsylvania
“Roger Williams is among the most controversial figures in colonial America. Some historians dismiss him as almost irrelevant; others consider him enormously significant. For example, W. K. Jordan, author of the classic Development of Religious Toleration in England, said Williams provided ‘the most important contribution’ to the development of toleration in the seventeenth century—a century which included Locke. Reading Roger Williams allows readers to make their own decision.”
—John M. Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty
“Notoriously cranky, complex, and diverse, Roger Williams shines as a religious liberator and repels as an exploiter of Natives. Prolific, provocative, brilliant, and often dense, his writings both need and reward the insights so richly applied by three deft scholars with deep expertise in colonial New England and its Native context. This collection reveals Williams as the most compelling, maddening, and revealing colonist of his century.”
—Alan Taylor, author of American Colonies: The Settlement of North America
“Revealing Roger Williams to be a highly capable, complicated, and irascible man who betrayed his own principles without fully realizing what he had done, this excellent documentary history is exceptionally well-conceived. The editors situate carefully chosen documents in historical context to reveal both the idealism and the tragedy of New England’s founding.”
—Amanda Porterfield, author of Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation
“Diplomacy, conflict, beliefs, betrayal, sovereignty, alliances, and politics...this book has them all. The “divide & conquer” strategy that you see play out throughout the writings included in Reading Roger Williams gives an inside view into Roger's thoughts, perspectives, and personal & professional goals. Although eye opening, it is painful and affirming to our oral history that he was not our FRIEND. He had many personal, professional, economic, political and ideological ambitions that were self-serving and certainly not in the best interest of the Indigenous people as he espoused in his rhetoric.”
—LORÉN SPEARS, Narragansett tribal citizen and executive director, Tomaquag Museum
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