SEA Featured Scholar, September 2025: Lori Rogers-Stokes
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
It was pure chance. After grad school, I came across James Cooper’s epic book, Tenacious of their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts, and found I was fascinated by the Puritans. It was also through Jeff Cooper that I joined New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH), a digital history project hosted by the Congregational Library & Archives, in 2013. Jeff was the director, and invited me in. I’ve been transcribing church records from the 17th through the 19th centuries for over a decade now, and it has completely changed my view of many fields—Puritan studies, Early America, religion, slavery, colonization, sex and gender … the list goes on. These are tens of thousands of pages of records that have been lost for centuries, and they are bursting with primary-source data on every aspect of life in Woodland New England during colonization and beyond. Without doubt, they are the most important new source in our fields, and I will be studying them forever.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
I resist calling historical documents “literature,” because they were not consciously written to be interpreted as literature, but what comes the closest to bridging that gap for me are the records minister Thomas Shepard made of his conversations with English women in the church at Pequosette/Cambridge in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1638 to 1649 (when he died). This is the topic of my first book, Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls. These women told their stories of spiritual seeking with fascinating details about their intimate lives in England and Woodland New England. What’s amazing to me is how strong and confident their voices are—they believed 100% in the importance of their own spiritual journeys, their questions and their answers. And, in an anomaly that really astounds, out of around 64 narratives, I’d say in 60 of them you cannot tell whether the narrator is male or female. There was no meaning in that identity before God. Their stories are very important.
What are you currently working on?
I have a book coming out on September 30, 2025, on Indigenous and English evolutions of Congregationalism—long-described as “the religion of the Puritans”—from the aftermath of King Philip’s War through the First Great Awakening, particularly the Halfway Covenant, which owes its survival in large part to Indigenous use. This work moves Indigenous Congregationalism from what scholars describe as a sheer survivance measure, or a “creole” practice, to a central role in the durability and meaningfulness of that denomination in Woodland New England. This is all the result of my years reading and transcribing Congregational church records with NEHH. I’m currently working on a database detailing this process in one town, Hassanamesit/Grafton, Massachusetts Bay Colony, across the turn of the 18th century, to test my theory that people who became church members through this innovative practice experienced a lasting connection that they handed down to their children. [Note: Lori’s book is Gathered into a Church: Indigenous-English Congregationalism in Woodland New England (UMass Press).]
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Adrian Chastain Weimer’s A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire. Important information delivered in a straightforward style makes it gripping.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
There are of course many, but I’ll choose Frank Bremer and Lisa Brooks. Frank could easily rest on his laurels but it would never occur to him, and he’s always advancing new work and new ideas. And Lisa Brooks changed my life, as I think she has changed so many, with Our Beloved Kin. That book showed a new way to do good history.
Lori Rogers-Stokes is an independent scholar.