Description
Mary Lee Settle's second Fellowship in 1998 was a research fellowship leading up to her 2002 biography on the controversial colonial figure "I, Roger Williams." She sought to write a straight biography of Williams to bring back to modern readers, students, and the consciousness of historians, the work and the life of this man, whom she believed to be the forerunner of our democratic ideas that went into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Williams' work and times had been a profound influence on such figures as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. By using Williams' own writing, letters, proposals in the Rhode Island charter, correspondences with figures from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and in England, and leading contemporary thinkers, this work sets apart from other biographies in letting Williams speak rather than arguments over interpretation.
