Abstract: The introduction provides an overview of the themes of the book. It describes the visit of the Roman Catholic bishop John Carroll to Boston in 1791 in order to indicate an 18th-century perspective on religious toleration, comparing this to issues surrounding political and ethnic diversity today. It explains how the controversial emergence of religious inclusion, equality, and cooperation is the history of America’s first great attempt to accommodate diversity and its first experiment with pluralism. It makes some caveats as to the nature of its study and suggets how the rest of the book is an introduction to the kinds of problems that arise when a culture premised upon uniformity gives way to a culture premised upon diversity.

Keywords: religion, liberty, pluralism, United States, eighteenth century, diversity, uniformity,