Cherry Fletcher Bamberg, Rhode Island author, has co-written a book John Clarke’s World with Judith Crandall Harbold which was released recently in 2018 by the Rhode Island Genealogical Society. Bamberg will give a book talk on John Clarke’s World on Thursday, March 14, 2019 at the Newport Historical Society Resource Center, 82 Touro Street, Newport, RI at 5:30pm.
JOHN CLARKE, one of the founders of Rhode Island, lived in a world very different from ours, a world of wonders, of religious explanations for natural and social events, of new beginnings and profound dislocation in his native country. He remains a more elusive figure than another Rhode Island Founder Roger Williams. Nonetheless, John Clarke had brothers and sisters, three wives, friends and enemies, as well as communities of faith in America and in England. This book explores these connections as well as the settings of John Clarke’s life: the village in which he grew up, the towns he helped to found in Rhode Island, and the vast metropolis of London in which he won the Rhode Island Charter of 1663. Against the passionate opposition of Rhode Island’s neighbors, John Clarke’s championship of toleration of religion helped to make it one of America’s core principles.
Cherry Fletcher Bamberg grew up in Newport and never quite got over it. She is a graduate of Brown University (BA 1965) and Linacre College, Oxon. (M.Phil. 1967) where she learned to cherish historical and biographical writing. She was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in 2007. The daughter of a weekend genealogist, she came to serious genealogy via involvement in the Rhode Island Historic Cemetery Database project, deciding after some years of searching out old cemetery records that she was much more interested in the people under the gravestones than in the gravestones themselves. Her research and writing centers on Rhode Island families and sources, with infrequent forays outside its borders. She has edited Rhode Island Roots, the journal of the Rhode Island Genealogical Society, since 2002 and edited or assisted with many of the books published by that organization. She is author of several books, most recently co-author with Judith C. Harbold of John Clarke’s World. While public speaking used to terrify her, she now enjoys any opportunity to persuade audiences of the delights of Rhode Island research.
This event takes place at the Newport Historical Society Resource Center, located at 82 Touro Street, Newport, RI. General admission costs $5 per person, $1 for Newport Historical Society members along with retired and active duty military. RSVP at NewportHistory.org.