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.

A revelatory look at the separation of church and state in America—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Influenza For four hundred years, Americans have fought over the proper relationships between church and state and between a free individual and the state. This is the story of the first battle in that war of ideas, a battle that led to the writing of the First Amendment and that continues to define the issue of the separation of church and state today. It began with religious persecution and ended in revolution, and along the way it defined the nature of America and of individual liberty. Acclaimed historian John M. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of Roger Williams, who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. This book is essential to understanding the continuing debate over the role of religion and political power in modern life.

Roger Williams, a deeply religious minister in seventeenth-century New England, revolutionized thinking about the role government should play in religion. Banished from Massachusetts for his controversial views, he founded the Town of Providence on the basis of full liberty of conscience and total separation of church and state. These radical ideas were adopted by the Colony of Providence Plantations, which later became known as the Colony and then State of Rhode Island. Williams also insisted, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that Europeans could acquire American land only through voluntary transactions with Native Americans. This is the story of the dramatic life, thought, and work of a man who refused to accept the conventional wisdom of his time and who forged a new way of thinking that came to characterize the best in the American tradition. Born and raised in England, Williams knew or otherwise personally encountered-during his youth or in later return visits-some of the greatest figures of English history: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, King James I, the young man who became King Charles I, John Milton, Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to such famous contemporaries, Williams persistently argued, publicly and unambiguously, for complete liberty of conscience and a wall of separation between church and state-both for America and for Europe. At a time when most of the governments in Europe and America promulgated some form of established religion that persecuted religious dissenters, Williams founded a polity that was explicitly based on the principles and values of what became, more than 150 years later, the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The First American Founder traces, often in Roger Williams's own colorful words, the conflicts that Williams and his settlement experienced in maintaining a haven for persecuted religious minorities. Those challenges came both in the form of military and political imperialism from other colonies and from internal dissension. The book explains how Williams faced these issues and managed to create and preserve a political society whose principles we could recognize today. It also discusses how Williams influenced, directly and indirectly, the generation that later fought the Revolutionary War and established the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This work is written for both the general reader and the professional historian. The main text is readable by all. The endnotes and appendices contain scholarly documentation and discussion that will satisfy the most meticulous student of history.

RISD announced the publication of Infinite Radius: Founding Rhode Island School of Design, the first anthology about the establishment of America's best-known college of art and design in 1877. "Infinite Radius" presents a handsome compendium of rare archival photographs, scholarly essays, previously unpublished manuscripts and reproductions of early acquisitions in its impressive collection of art and design. Together, this written and visual material provides invaluable insight into the social and cultural context in which both the academic programs of the School and the broader educational mission of the RISD Museum of Art took root. Infinite Radius takes its title from a RISD founder, the 19th-century educator and activist Sarah Elizabeth Doyle, who was known to remark that the "sphere" of so-called women's work was one with an "infinite radius." From the beginning, co-editors Dawn Barrett, RISD's dean of Architecture and Design, and Andrew Martinez, RISD's archivist, conceived of the book in a similar, all-encompassing way. The book is intended to inspire further research into the many areas it broaches, from the initial seed funding for the school from the Rhode Island Women's Centennial Commission, to its early successes thanks to the direction, governance and support of the Metcalf family, to its growing strength in the early 20th century.