September 2015
Beloit College, Beloit, WI
Seeds of Education 

College freshmen are settling into their new dorm rooms and starting classes this month, congregating on campuses with the common goal of improving their minds. It was the same in the fall of 1850 when Aaron Lucius Chapin addressed Beloit College. "Year by year, it gathers into its bosom a crowd of bright youth drawn from families of every rank and profession." Chapin was a Congregational minister and the first president of Beloit College. Inspired by Congregational missionaries in the United States and abroad, he was part of a movement to found a dozen Congregational colleges in the mid-1800s.
 
 
The Last Puritans
The latest work from Executive Director Dr. Margaret Bendroth is due out next month.

Congregationalists are the oldest group of American Protestants, but the denomination has been influential through the course of United States history. The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past tells the story of how the Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, evolved into the United Church of Christ, one of the most progressive branches of Protestant Christianity.

 
New Director for NEHH Program

Having worked with New England church records for 35 years, James "Jeff" Cooper joins us from Oklahoma State University to serve as director of our New England's Hidden Histories program. Jeff received his Ph.D. for the University of Connecticut and is the author of Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America and has edited, with Kenneth P. Minkema, The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris and The Church Records of Reading and Rumney-Marsh, Massachusetts. His most recent article is "Cuffee's 'Relation': a Faithful
Slave Speaks through the Project for the Preservation of Congregational Church Records."

 
Upcoming Events
History Matters series - Daily Bread: Food and Spirituality in Early Boston
Thursday, October 15, 2015
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History Matters series - Putting the Congregation back into puritan Congregationalism 
Thursday, November 12, 2015
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