I recently had a chance to talk about one of my favorite digital history initiatives, New England’s Hidden Histories project, with colleagues Frank Bremer, Jeff Cooper, and Richard Boles. Sponsored by the Congregational Library in Boston, NEHH contains thousands of digitized images of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript church records and related manuscripts. It’s an amazing research and teaching resource for scholars of religion in early America.

Many of the most important manuscripts I studied while researching and writing Darkness Falls on the Land of Light are now available on the NEHH platform, including rare church admission relations from Chebacco (now Essex), Haverhill, Medfield, Middleborough, and Westborough, Massachusetts, and Hebron, Connecticut; scores of record books from Congregational churches and ministerial associations throughout New England; and diaries, letters, sermons notebooks, and other writings by lay people and ministers such as John Cleveland, Joseph Green, William Homes, Thomas Josselyn, Ebenezer Parkman, Jonathan Parsons, Daniel Rogers, Ebenezer Storer, and Ebenezer Turrell.

The records available at NEHH are capable of supporting an almost infinite number of research projects, from high school history essays to Ph.D. dissertations. Students, scholars, and history buffs alike can get involved in the site’s crowdsourced transcription projects. One of the highlights of project is the BIPOC section. Curated by Boles and inspired by his recent book, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North (New York, 2020), the detailed finding aid provides direct links to Congregational church records documenting the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in early New England churches.

As Jeff explains in the discussion, the program has expanded in recent years through collaborative partnerships with some of the most distinguished research archives in New England, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, New England Historic Genealogical Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the Peabody-Essex Museum. To learn more, visit NEHH at http://congregationallibrary.org/nehh/main.