Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, is an independent scholar, public historian, and former contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making three centuries of Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the first century of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where forms of church and state were created that are still shaping American history for better and for worse today.