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Authors

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)

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Questions for Discussion and Writing

Williams is a revolutionary figure within the revolution brought about by New England Puritanism.  With fervor and courage, he insisted that principles of independent thought and personal free will, which were fundamental principles in the English Reformation, should stand strong against Bay Colony calls for conformism.  The NAAL selections include a famous polemic for religious and political freedom, an open letter, and a first attempt at understanding and promulgating the fundamentals of a Native American language.  Were these writings self-consciously “literary”?  Probably they were not – but the writings and the public history of Roger Williams helped to inspire a spirit, or temperament, that held strong in the Rhode Island colony, a community of “dissenters from the dissenters.” 

1. Williams makes a strong argument for freedom of speech and thought, in a moment when the Bay Colony believed itself, with good reason, to be in a crisis that required unity.  What do you think of Williams’s position in that context?  What balance between freedom and solidarity do you think was appropriate just then?

2.  Through much of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Rhode Island prided itself as a place apart: citizens of this state, the smallest in the Union, often spoke proudly of a contrarian attitude, a feisty, creative, independent spirit that supposedly distinguished this community from other states along the North Atlantic seaboard.  In the later twentieth century, however, the “megalopolis” took shape, resulting in urban development that now spreads almost without interruption from northern Virginia to the southern borders of Maine.  With the advent of suburbs and super-cities along this corridor of the East Coast, what is left of Rhode Island’s individuality?  When looking at the web sites of some of its cultural and academic institutions – the University of Rhode Island, Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and others – what indications do you still find there of a wish to be distinct, in spirit, from the surrounding world?