Join the Rhode Island Historical Society on Sunday, September 22nd, at 1 p.m. for a conversation on Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America with authors Linford Fisher, Sheila McIntyre, and Julie Fisher, as they explore their work to document Williams in his own words. They will be joined in conversation by Professor Mack Scott (Narragansett).
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 found was deep in Native country, situated between the powerful Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. The Williams that emerges from the documents in this collection, which span his lifetime, 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.
During this talk, the authors explore the challenges of creating the first published collection of Williams's writings since 1953; how to make 2600+ pages of Williams's often cranky, rambling, and hard-to-understand words meaningful to 21st-century readers? Rather than presenting a one-sided image of Williams as purely a hero or villain, the discussion will attempt to reconcile all of the messy, contradictory aspects of someone who bridged so many worlds. They will also consider what Williams may have to say to us today. What if we took the best parts of him and really took them to heart?
Linford D. Fisher is an 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 a 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, as well as articles on early American communications and funeral practices.
Julie A. Fisher is an educator and historian of early America. She has 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.
Mack Scott (Narragansett) is a visiting assistant professor in the Ruth J.Simmons Center and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies concentration at Brown University. His research and teaching focus is on the intersections of race and identity, employing agency as a lens through which to view and understand the voices, stories, and perspectives obscured in traditional narratives. He is currently working on a project that traces the Narragansett Nation from the colonial to the modern era.
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