Lori Rogers-Stokes
Parallel Universe: Puritans in Woodland New England
When the puritans landed in the Eastern Woodlands in 1630, they said they landed in New England. The parallel universe is a sci-fi concept, but I’ll apply to American colonial history to show how puritan colonizers created a separate reality for themselves and for the land itself in what they called New England, imposing it on others until it became the only reality. I’ll walk people through a process for recovering Indigenous reality then and now.
Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, (lori.stokes@comcast.net | LinkedIn) is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during which time the Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands began to preserve and protect their history and identity as English puritans created New England, and forms of church and state that would shape American history for better or worse for centuries to come.