First off, a brief item of business for those of you listening in close to real time – on April 11, 2023, I’ll be in Washington with some free time in the evening. If Washington area listeners want to do a meet up, send me a note at thehistoryoftheamericans@gmail.com, through the website, or by DM on Twitter. If we get a few takers I’ll find some place that is reasonably convenient to DuPont Circle where I will be staying, and get it organized. I hope we can do it!

In this episode we recount Roger Williams’ first few years in Massachusetts, following his refusal of the post of “teacher” at the church in Boston on the ground that it was insufficiently “separated.” In the years until 1624, Williams would begin to develop his idea that church and state must be separate. With the goal of saving Indian souls, he also deepened his understanding of the local tribes and Algonquian language and culture. He would live in Salem, then Plymouth, and back to Salem, but he spent most of his time abroad in the land, paddling his canoe from one Indian village to another. Also during these years, religious zeal in both Massachusetts and back in England, although in different form, would become even more extreme. Zealotry, it would turn out, was not all it was cracked up to be.

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Selected references for this episode

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

#108 The Dissenters: Roger Williams Part 1