An inclusive early history of an iconic New England church The history inscribed in New England's meetinghouses waits to be told. There, colonists gathered for required worship on the Sabbath, for town meetings, and for court hearings. There, ministers and local officials, many of them slave owners, spoke about salvation, liberty, and justice. There, women before the Civil War found a role and a purpose outside their households. This innovative exploration of a coastal Connecticut town, birthplace of two governors and a Supreme Court Chief Justice, retrieves the voices preserved in record books and sermons and the intimate views conveyed in women's letters. Told through the words of those whose lives the meetinghouse shaped, Forgotten Voices uncovers a hidden past. It begins with the displacement of Indigenous people in the area before Europeans arrived, continues with disputes over worship and witchcraft in the early colonial settlement, and looks ahead to the use of Connecticut's most iconic white church as a refuge and sanctuary. Relying on the resources of local archives, the contents of family attics, and the extensive records of the Congregational Church, this community portrait details the long ignored genocide and enslaved people and reshapes prevailing ideas about history's makers. Meticulously researched and including 75 color illustrations, Forgotten Voices will be of interest to anyone exploring the roots of community life in New England. The book is the joint project of the Old Lyme meetinghouse and the Florence Griswold Museum. The museum will host a major exhibit in 20192020, exploring the role of the meetinghouse.

John Erskine was the leading evangelical in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Educated at Edinburgh University, he learned to appreciate the epistemology of John Locke and other empiricists alongside key Scottish Enlightenment figures. As a clergyman, he integrated the style and moral teachings of the Moderate Enlightenment into his discourses and posited new theories on traditional views of Calvinism in his theological treatises. While widely recognized as an able preacher and theologian, Erskine's primary contribution to evangelicalism was as a disseminator. He sent countless religious and philosophical works to correspondents like Jonathan Edwards so that he and others could learn about current ideas, update their writings, and provide an apologetic against perceived heretical authors. Erskine also was crucial in the publishing of books and pamphlets by some of the best evangelical theologians in America and Britain. Within his lifetime, Erskine's main contribution was as a propagator of an enlightened form of evangelicalism. While there is a great deal of scholarship on Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, Yeager argues that it is time to expand the scholarship of eighteenth-century evangelicalism by turning to one of their lesser-studied colleagues. In this new biography of Erskine, Jonathan Yeager lays out the life and thought of a hitherto under-researched - yet, in his day, widely respected - preacher and gives Erskine the scholarly treatment that he so richly deserves.