Blog Post

“How Christian an Understanding?” – June 21 event at the Great Friends Meetinghouse in Newport, RI

When strung together, words like “religion,””history,” and “politics” can be contentious.  To help us make sense of our past, the Spectacle of Toleration program will explore questions about religion in American history throughout 2013.  This year-long project marks the 350th anniversary of the 1663 King Charles II charter that established the colony (which would later become the state) of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  Unique for its time, the charter instructed that no person “shall bee any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinione in matters of religion,” formally establishing the “livelie experiment” which would come to define Rhode Island.

While the charter granted religious toleration, what exactly did that mean for the people of Rhode Island?  How did Rhode Island’s “livelie experiment” affect other British colonies in North America?  And, what effect did this policy have on the United States’ founding and subsequent history?

These are difficult questions to answer.  Many of us read them with our minds already made up.  Rather than thoughtfully considering the questions, we look only to the historical facts which supports our convictions.

But what would happen if we thought about the past differently?  What if we withheld our preconceived notions, and genuinely sifted through the evidence, eager to learn how the founders of the colony of Rhode Island, or the United States more generally, thought about the relationship between religion and government?  Perhaps we would learn something surprising both about the past and about ourselves.

This is the first in a line of blog posts which will explore some of these topics.  We will  first look at how historians think, and consider how this affects our view of the past.  At a June 21, 2013 Newport Historical Society event entitled “How Christian an Understanding?” three scholars met to discuss Roger Williams, the founding of Rhode Island, and the founding of the United States.  After exploring how to think historically, we will consider what these scholars, John Barry, John Fea, and Michael Feldberg said about religion and politics in history.  Later posts will consider topics ranging from the specific history of Newport, RI, to Rhode Island as a whole, and the United States more broadly.  We will compare the material culture (objects from the past), historical documents, architecture, and texts written by historians in order to make sense of how religion and politics related in the past, and what bearing that has on life for us today.

So who am I?  My name is Katherine Garland and I am a Public History MA student at UMass-Amherst in western Massachusetts spending my summer as a Buchanan/Burnham intern at the Newport Historical Society in Newport, RI.  If you have questions or comments, or suggestions for future blog topics, feel free to send me an email.  I look forward to joining you this summer as we explore some of these difficult historical questions together!