More information and a registration form is available at our website.

 Join Professor Rick Kennedy (Point Loma Nazarene University) and the Congregational Library for a Brown Bag Lunch entitled "A Kinder, Gentler Cotton Mather Muses on Jewish History." Professor Kennedy will look at ways in which Cotton Mather was the first American Evangelical. He will also talk about the origins of American Evangelicalism in the ways Cotton Mather responded to the local culture and politics of Boston, Cambridge, and Charlestown between 1686 and 1707 and look into the life of this fascinating man in the history of American culture, politics, literature, science, and religion who coined the term "American" as a distinctive type of cultural perspective. 

This Brown Bag Lunch will take place on Thursday, March 6th.

All Brown Bag Lunches begin promptly at 12:00pm and run until 1:00pm. We encourage you to register early online.

  A good friend of the Library, Rev. Dr. Douglas Showalter has been highlighting the rich history of Congregationalism on Facebook, with his group "Explore Congregational Church History." Every day Rev. Showalter provides a starting point and the rest of the group's 125-plus members take it from there. It is an open Facebook group, so if you have an account you're welcome to view it at http://www.facebook.com/groups/congregationalhistory/ and see for yourself the healthy community being fostered there. And thanks to Rev. Showalter for linking to our collection from time to time!

The Story of America: Essays on Origins

Jill Lepore 

Princeton University Press, 2012

I first heard Jill Lepore at the Boston Book Festival discussing "Blindspot," a mock eighteenth-century novel, jointly written with Jane Kamensky. She spoke as an accomplished storyteller and historian. In her book of essays, all but one appearing first in The New Yorker, Ms. Leporedelivers a range of stories and history beginning with John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.  She writes in her introduction, " ...I wrote them because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics. " Her topics include the Founding Fathers, Henry Longfellow and the Civil War, Charles Dickens, Clarence Darrow, Charlie Chan, voting regulations, accounts of the depression, and the decline of inaugural speeches.  Reviewers' comments include "it is not like the boring surveys of American history" and "This book should be required reading in secondary and high school history classes. It gives a human perspective to our nation's historical turning points." Cathy N. Davidson of Duke University writes "That history is conflicted, ragged, and contradictory but, in Lepore's capable hands, as gripping and compelling as a novel."