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.

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable... ...until a team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked Williams' code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of Williams' writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believer's baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan "Apostle to the Indians," John Eliot. Amazingly, Williams' code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of Eliot's book supporting infant baptism. History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger Williams' final treatise. Decoding Roger Williams reveals for the first time Williams' translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts.

Youre banished! Its the twenty-first century. You cant banish me like Roger Williams was. Its our elevator. We can do what we want to! Fred reached into his pocket and took out a gun. When he pointed it upward toward Kate, she jumped away from the top of the shaking elevator and moved over to the ladder. As she gripped one of the rusty metal rungs, she felt a rush of wind behind her. The sounds of screaming voices and scraping metal fell downward with the elevator through the shaft. As the protagonist of Roger Williams in an Elevator, Kate Odyssey is a resident of Rhode Island and a descendant of Roger Williams. After she becomes trapped in a partially destroyed building, she helps people who are trapped inside of eight different elevators: yelling, accounting, liberty, watery, fiery, falling, sharing, and hidden. The different elevator communities create their own rules and freedoms. Events from these communities are connected to Roger Williamss seventeenth-century search for freedom. In her dreams and reality, Kate meets Roger Williams and his legacy. During her journey, she sees statues of Roger Williams and historic items in the Rhode Island State House. Photos of these attractions appear in Roger Williams in an Elevator.

From afar, Latin America looks like a blurry tableau: devoid of defining lines, particularities and nuances. Little is understood about the idiosyncrasies of Latin-Americans, their cultural identity and social values. Differences between Brazilians and Spanish Americans, or amid the diverse Spanish American countries, are not sufficiently understood. Even less is known about the amplitude of the Iberian heritage of such countries, or about the miscegenation and acculturation processes that took place among their different constitutive races. There is no clarity regarding the Western nature of Latin America or about its cultural affinities with Latin Europe. Nor is there sufficient understanding of the links between the Latin population of the United States and the inhabitants of Latin America.This book aims to fill the gap by focusing on Latin America's history, culture, identity and idiosyncrasies. It serves as a guide to understand regional attitudes, meanings and behavioural differences of the region. It also analyses the present economic situation of the region, while trying to predict the future of the region. Written in a simple and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to readers keen on exploring the region for potential opportunities in trade, investment or any other kind of business and cultural endeavor.

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable......until a team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked WilliamsOCO code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of WilliamsOCO writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believerOCOs baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan OC Apostle to the Indians, OCO John Eliot. Amazingly, WilliamsOCO code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of EliotOCOs book supporting infant baptism.History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger WilliamsOCO final treatise. "Decoding Roger Williams" reveals for the first time WilliamsOCO translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts."

Thanks to coded notes taken by the teenager John Pynchon, this volume virtually transports the reader back to Sundays in the seventeenth century, when the community gathered to listen to the Rev. George Moxon. The setting was Springfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 by John's father William Pynchon. As a note-taker, John recorded just what he heard in this rare resource, which allows the reader to listen in on the weekly sermons he documented in the 1640s. This symbol-by-symbol transcription into a word-for-word text preserves the character of the minister's original remarks, and reveals Moxon as an able, engaging speaker who offered encouragement--and challenge--to the growing plantation he faithfully served through its earliest years on the edge of a wilderness. Not only do the sermons in this collection provide snippets of popular theological discourse at particular moments in the 1600s; they also point to issues of the day, and they help us get inside the thoughts and word patterns of that era.