Divided America: Religious Dissent & Freedom
On view starting October 21, 2024 in the Harriette Hemmasi Exhibition Gallery at the John Hay Library
20 Prospect St., Providence, RI
Hours
Through The Divided America Project, the John Hay Library is digitizing and making freely available the bulk of the Hall-Hoag Collection, the country’s largest research compilation of materials produced by dissenting and extremist political organizations across the ideological spectrum. Containing nearly 1.5 million individual items representing more than 30,000 organizations across the country, and covering the period from 1946 to 1999, the collection provides a deep and nuanced look at American politics and political culture from the end of the Second World War to the eve of the September 11 attacks.
Unparalleled in breadth and depth, Hall-Hoag is unique for aggregating material from organizations with faint, if any, traces in the archival record. A particular strength of Hall-Hoag is documenting many dissenting and extremist organizations at the local level, where materials are most ephemeral and least visible in the historical record.
As one of the Library’s premier collections, the Hall-Hoag Collection forms the anchor for the strategic collecting initiative Ideology & Power, which seeks to provide coherence and promote public access to more than 200 years of original material that documents the evolution of political, social, and religious ideologies in the United States.
The Divided America: Religious Dissent and Freedom exhibit highlights material from the Hall-Hoag Collection dating from the 1950s to 1990s on topics including the separation of church and state, the development of inclusive theology and churches, Christian Nationalism, Christian Peace Activism, the development of the Nation of Islam, and the U.S. atheist movement.
The Divided America Project is funded through grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission’s Access to Historical Records: Major Initiatives program and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Explore the Hall-Hoag Collection digitally in the Brown Digital Repository. Additional material will be added through December 2025.