Friday June 21, 2013 from 5pm-7pm

Great Friends Meeting House

21 Farewell Street, Newport, RI

The panel will address questions regarding what Rhode Island’s founders intended and expected when they wrote the 1663 Charter, what our nation’s founding fathers intended and expected regarding the separation of Church and State, and what it all means now. Public questions will be taken. Panelists include: John M. Barry, Daniel Cowdin, John Fea and Michael Feldberg.

JOHN M. BARRY

John M. Barry is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author whose books have won several dozen awards. His work includes: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty along with Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America and The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History. Barry has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Fortune, The Washington Post, Esquire and frequently appears as a guest commentator on every broadcast network in the U.S., including NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s World News Tonight, PBS’s The News Hour, numerous NPR shows, and such foreign media as the BBC.

DANIEL COWDIN

Daniel Cowdin, Ph.D. is a professor of religious and theology studies at Salve Regina University.

JOHN FEA

John Fea , Ph.D. is Associate Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. His writing on early American history has appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He is the author of The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation (Notre Dame University Press, 2010), and most recently Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011).

MICHAEL FELDBERG

Author and scholar Michael Feldberg, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the George Washington Institute of Religious Freedom. He has written several books including Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History.

Admission to How Christian an Understanding? is free, donations welcome. To register, visit: http://howchristiananunderstanding.eventbrite.com/. This program is generously sponsored by: The Spectacle of Toleration, the Governor’s 1663 Charter Commission, The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and the Rhode Island Chapter of the ACLU.

The Spectacle of Toleration is a year-long event marking the 350th anniversary of the King Charles II charter. Admission is free, donations welcome. This is the third Spectacle of Toleration program; best-selling author James Carroll lectured in October  2012 and in May 2013 The Spectacle presented an afternoon concert, A Spectacle of Music, celebrating the sounds of 18^th century Newport through four separate performances.

Upcoming Spectacle of Toleration programs include the October 2013 conference on the role of religious toleration in society, No Person Shall Bee Any Wise Molested. For more information about the Spectacle project, and other state-wide initiatives marking the 350th anniversary of the Charter, visit: http://www.spectacleoftoleration.org/. 

July 8, 2013 at 1pm

August 5, 2013 at 1pm

NHS headquarters, 82 Touro Street, Newport

$10 per person, free for NHS members

Reservations required, 401-841-8770

Whether you would like to know more about your house’s history or discover your family genealogy, the Newport Historical Society’s library is the place to start. Learn how to use the NHS resources from the Society’s expert staff during this hour-long workshop. Space is very limited; reservations required. Walk-ins cannot be guaranteed a spot.

Text of the retreat order, from the NHS collections.

On 28 August 1778 General Sullivan ordered the American forces on Aquidneck Island to retreat to the north and hold positions at Butt’s Hill, with flanks on the east road and west road. This document, signed by Adjutant General William Peck, forwards orders to Colonel John Laurens who followed the west road and engaged the British at Butt’s Hill the following day. Col. John Laurens (1754-1782) was a member of Washington’s staff and served at Brandywine, Monmouth, Germantown, Valley Forge and Yorktown. On the reverse, the document includes a notation written by William Ellery.

A detailed image of the Lopez Account Book from the NHS collections.

Laura Parrish, Associate Librarian at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, contacted the Newport Historical Society to help authenticate a suspected Aaron Lopez account book in their collections. We were able to do so by comparing the account balance of Mary Tomlin in their book to a similar entry in one of the books in our collection. In October 1765 she had a balance of £89.16 which was transferred to a new ledger book “M” after the clerk ran out of room in the old book. Our Lopez book “M” picked up the same balance, transferred from the old book, thus proving the connection. These missing puzzle pieces from around the world come to our attention often and always shed light on the scope of international trade and the depths of our own collections.

NHS account book “M” showing same balance transferred in October 1765.

Newport High School graduation program 1873, from the NHS collections.

High school proms and graduations are in full swing and white stretch limousines are buzzing around town. In 1873 The Newport High School held its last commencement of ten seniors on Thursday, 24 July. The following year, high school students entered a new building on Church Street built from a $100,000 bequest by local merchant William Sanford Rogers (1786-1872). The new Rogers High School remained at that site until it moved to Broadway in 1905. The old building eventually became the Thayer School and now serves as part of the Boys & Girls Club of Newport County.

Image of the 1873 Rogers High School building on Church Street, now the Boys & Girls Clubs of Newport County, from the NHS Collections.

We hope to find out more in the weeks to come!

An image from the NHS Collections featured in “The Greatest Trial”.

May 31, 2013 – September 2, 2013

The Museum of Newport History

Admission is free, suggested donation $4 per person

401-841-8770

Abraham Lincoln never visited Newport, nevertheless the collections of the Newport Historical Society reveal the profound impact that he had on the City by the Sea from his election in 1860 to his assassination in 1865. The new exhibit, The Greatest Trial, features Civil War era artifacts and photographs from the Society’s rich collections, as well as first hand accounts of Newporters at home and in the field who lived through the trauma of the Civil War.

A complimentary exhibit section of the Explore Historic Newport, the Society’s web based app, contains further images and stories from Newport’s contribution to the War, allowing visitors to access more stories and information, or experience the exhibit remotely. This content can be viewed on a home computer by visiting NewportHistoryApp.com or by scanning QR codes with a smart phone when viewing the exhibit in person.

Invitation from the Newport Historical Society’s collection of invitations, calling cards and dinner menus

Memorial Day has passed and we are moving into the summer party season. Engraved invitations from the Gilded Age were short and sweet, and often amounted to a summons. Caroline Astor’s party at her Fifth Avenue home started at ten o’clock on a cold Monday night in January. The Brown’s party at Harbour Court was a little more manageable on a warm summer afternoon.

Rhode Island Military Commission signed and sealed by Governor William Greene 1743, possibly printed by Ann Franklin. From the Newport Historical Society's collections.

As we celebrate the 1663 King Charles Charter and approaching Flag Day, we are reminded of an important symbolic element of government: The Great Seal of Rhode Island. This simple heraldic device of a shield with an anchor first appeared as a doodle in the records of the General Assembly. Penned in May 1647 by William Dyre, Secretary, it accompanied the resolution “The Seale of the Province shall be an Anchor.” After that time, all official Rhode Island documents included the seal as printed, embossed or stamped in wax. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of William Dyre’s record, the Rhode Island State Flag, as we know it today, was officially adopted in 1897.

The April 20 New York Times story, “Thrown for a Curve in Rhode Island,” highlighted the state’s troubling investment in Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios gaming company. The resulting portrait of the state in The Times, not to mention The Journal’s nearly daily reports on 38 Studios’ demise, repeated a single story of Rhode Island’s economic woes and presented a picture of an unsophisticated state dragging the “heavy anchor” of past bad practices.

This narrative eclipses a much longer-term and more positive view of Rhode Island expressed in the state’s early tenets of freedom, tolerance and diversity. Local headlines from the last few days suggest our citizens and legislators together are open to new stories. Indeed, Rhode Island’s earliest history is one of forward-looking innovation. This year Rhode Island celebrates the 350th anniversary of its founding 1663 Colonial Charter, the only one of its time to establish religious freedom and separation of church and state as founding principles.

The Charter introduced a model that catalyzed many freedoms — to worship, innovate and build communities. These freedoms have not been fully realized, and disparities and inequities persist. Nevertheless, the early idea of Rhode Island as a place of “toleration” continues to be a locus for promoting human rights in a divided world that presidents from Washington to Obama have recognized.

To emphasize this point, one only needs to reflect on President Obama’s visit in March to Israel, where he presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a framed wooden artifact from the George Washington Room of Newport’s Touro Synagogue, the first synagogue established in the United States.

The frame included a plaque with a passage from George Washington’s “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport” sent in response to Moses Seixas, then warden of the Touro congregation, on Aug. 17, 1790.

“Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree,” the plaque reads, “and there shall be none to make him afraid.” The values of openness and toleration enabled early Newport to challenge norms and become disrupters and ambassadors for new ideas and practices. Rhode Island prospered as a result, and was successful and influential through the 18th and 19th centuries.

To be sure, Rhode Island’s current economic troubles are dire, but the view from the past suggests that our outlook is not so dismal. Our history teaches us that we have found economic success through openness, creative thinking, and a global perspective. In addition, the historical data that reside in Rhode Island’s manuscripts, books, photos, paintings, buildings, furniture and more are an economic asset. Recognition of and support for the state’s rich historical assets will leverage growth across industries and translate Rhode Island’s history into action.

Accessing and interpreting these historical assets in meaningful ways not only engage visitors to our state but have the capacity to inspire entrepreneurs, challenge and inform policy, promote sound urban and economic development, protect human rights and foster innovation.

We are not certain why the negative aspects of the past have been allowed to dominate our current narrative. We are not Massachusetts’s rival. We are not the mafia. We are not 38 Studios. Atop Rhode Island’s State House in Providence stands the Independent Man — a symbol of the importance and continued relevance of our founding Charter.

Let’s dive deeper into this longer, more dynamic narrative to revitalize our identity, our perspective and our economy. Rhode Island has a compelling opportunity to collaborate across cultural, academic, industry and government institutions to empower our state. It is time to develop new, diverse and dynamic stories of a connected, collaborative and resilient state.

Perhaps the next New York Times headline will read, “Rhode Island’s Boom Fueled by Cultural Innovation.”

Elizabeth Francis, Ph.D., is executive director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.