NEHH: Recovering Untold Stories From Revolutionary New England

FAIN: PW-304329-25

American Congregational Association (Boston, MA 02108-3704)
Tricia Peone (Project Director: July 2024 to present)

The inclusion of 22,000 pages of Congregational Church records revealing Black and Indigenous histories from the Revolutionary War period into New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital project that makes accessible early American church records. The new material would come from six institutions in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and these partners would also participate in outreach activities to share the project with scholars and local communities.  

New England’s Hidden Histories is a project sponsored by the Congregational Library & Archives which seeks to digitize, describe, transcribe, and make accessible early church records from the New England region for the use of scholars, educators, students, and community members. The project proposes to digitize 22,000 pages of records from six partner institutions, as well as to transcribe 7,500 pages of records, and make these resources available online for free to the public. Project activities will focus on recovering untold stories, especially of the experiences of African American and Indigenous people, from Congregational church materials during the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. As the nation begins to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Revolution, these primary sources provide material for new histories of this formative period, drawn from the communities where the Revolution began.