Recent Posts
- Barrington’s Nockum Hill, Oliver Cromwell, and the English Civil War: A Prelude to King Philip’s War
- John Manley’s Bad Day in Newport in December 1776
- The Ku Klux Klan Attempts To Take Over Rhode Island Militia
- Riding the Rails
- Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episodes 4, 5, and 6
- What Colonel Christopher Greene Owned (and Did not Own) in 1779 and 1781
- Governor, Chief Justice, and Signer Stephen Hopkins
- Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episodes 2 and 3
- Pokanoket or Wampanoag?: The Origins of Names
- Job E. Townsend Coffin Accounts and Newport Town Council Records: Research of African American Ancestors
- Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episode 1
- Old Home Days in Rhode Island
- An Enslaved Teenager’s Journey from Warren, to Providence and Finally to the British Caribbean
- Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916
- Rhode Island’s Carnegie Medal Winners for Heroism (Last Names Beginning with A to D)
- Narragansett Indian Last Names Over the Centuries
- Book Review: The Selected Writings of Thomas Wilson Dorr. Edited, with an Introduction, by Erik J. Chaput & Russell J. DeSimone (Rhode Island Publications Society, 2025).
- Exodus to the Shore: Resorts for Ordinary People
- Book Review: Douglas R. Egerton, A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
- Historians Confused by Three Joseph Wantons in Colonial Newport
- Eliza Jumel’s Rags to Riches Story
- Schooling for Enslaved Youth in Newport Before the Revolution
- Rhode Island Almost Sparks Revolutionary War in 1774 by Stealing Cannon in Newport
- My Day at the Battle of Lexington and Concord 250th Reenactment
- A Rhode Island Officer’s Recollections Lead to New Information on Battle of Red Bank
- African American Property Ownership in Newport from the 1780s to 1820s
- Book Review: Linford D. Fisher, Sheila M. McIntyre, and Julia A. Fisher, Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America, A Documentary History
- Book Review: The Rise of Newport’s Catholics: From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders, by John F. Quinn (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024)
- Elisha Potter Jr., Thomas Commuck, and Indigenous Land Claims from the Brothertown Narragansetts
- South Kingstown’s Partial Census for 1730: Whites, Indians and Blacks
- The South Kingstown Planters: Country Gentry in Colonial Rhode Island
- How Narragansett Beer Survived Prohibition (But Still Couldn’t Escape the Government)
- “Boasted Land of Freedom”: Rhode Island Black Leaders and the Early Black Convention Movement, 1830-1835
- East Greenwich Historic Markers Project Completed
- Wickford’s Historic Marker Project
- Massive Timber Salvage After the Great Hurricane of 1938
- William Gilbane and Thomas Gilbane
- French Officers at the Battle of Rhode Island
- Book Review: CJ Martin, The Precious Birthright: Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024)
- Book Review: Abby Chandler, Seized with the Temper of The Times: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America (Westholme, 2023)
- Book Review: Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
- The Providence Journal Publishes Despite the Historic 1886 Flood and the Blizzard of 1888
- Till We Meet Again: A Farewell (For Now) from Robert Grandchamp
- Boys Hired to Deliver the Providence Journal from 1833 to 1873 Reveal Their Pranks and Challenges
- Victims of Newport’s Stamp Act Riots Reimbursed (Not)
- “I Had Like to Have Forgot to Mention a Famous Sham Battle”
- Mary Cowley: Eighteenth Century Rhode Island Entrepreneur
- Railroad Signal Tower 133+ at Kingston Station Reconsidered
- Lafayette in Rhode Island
- Why Did Rhode Island Merchants Resist Non-Importation in 1767?
- “We got the worst of it yesterday:” A Rhode Island letter from Spotsylvania Court House
- The Westerly Post Office Mural Mystery
- Newport’s Last Slave Auction: Rochambeau’s Prizes
- Business Owners Try to Control How Their Employees Vote in 1876 Election
- The Smith Granite Company of Westerly: A Short History
- Indian Forts in Early Rhode Island
- Rhode Islanders Insist on No Compromise with the South after Lincoln’s Election
- Rhode Island Fails to Vote for Lincoln for President at Nominating Convention!
- Governor’s 1708 Report Tells Where the First Black Enslaved People Who Arrived in Rhode Island Came from and About the Arrival of the First Slave Ship from Africa
- A Retrospective on Spartina, a Novel Based in South County
- Water Rights and Dams in Early Rhode Island
- Roger Williams: Founder of Economic Development
- A Book Review: Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence by Shirley L. Green (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2023)
- A History of Election Tickets in Rhode Island
- The Murder Trial of the Reverend Ephraim Avery at Newport (Part II of II)
- The Murder of Sarah Maria Cornell in Tiverton in 1832 (Part I of II)
- Benoni Sweet: a 19th Century Rhode Island Daredevil Worth Remembering
- Sam Patch: a 19th Century Rhode Island Daredevil Worth Remembering
- How Providence’s Federal Hill Got Its Name
- Teaching a Class of 920 Students at URI in the 1970s
- Gaspee Raid Inspires Boston Tea Party Raiders to Disguise Themselves as Narragansetts
- Narragansetts (Not Mohawks) Blamed for Boston Tea Party
- Samuel Casey, Talented Colonial Silversmith and Notorious Counterfeiter, Escapes the Hangman
- The First Female Scientist at Naval Underwater Ordnance Station, Newport
- Roger Williams in Rhode Island
- A Book Review: Rhode Island Election Tickets: A Survey of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Paper Ballots (Rhode Island Publications Society, 2023). Compiled by Russell J. DeSimone. Introduction by Patrick T. Conley.
- The Sloop Providence: Its Role in the Revolutionary War and its Rebuilding
- The Last Dozen: The Final Survivors of the Seventh Rhode Island Volunteers
- Lonnon Philips’s Sharecropping Agreement in 18th Century North Kingstown
- “Hope Deferred”: George T. Downing and the Post-Civil War Civil Rights Movement
- George T. Downing and the Black Convention Movement
- Whale Sinks Whale Ship Commanded by Newport Captain
- Providence Merchant John Brown Gets Rich Privateering in 1776 and 1777
- General Isaac Peace Rodman, Citizen-Soldier and Martyr for the Union Cause
- Banister’s Band of Brothers: Fox Hunting in South Kingstown and Narragansett After the American Revolution
- New York’s Izzy Einstein Raids Rhode Island Saloons During Prohibition
- Book Launch: Machine Guns in Narraganset Bay: The Coast Guard’s War on Rumrunners
- Block Island Rumrunners, Rum Row and a Pirate Ship
- Did Rhode Island Matter in the American Revolution?
- Book Review: Revolutionary War Defenses in Rhode Island by John K. Robertson
- Ann Bates: British Spy Extraordinaire
- Rhode Island’s Surviving Town Animal Pounds—Relics of the Past
- When the Roma Came to Rhode Island
- Rhode Island’s Millionaires in 1892 and How They Made Their Money
- Teaching the Story of “Universal Liberty” in Revolutionary Rhode Island: A Review of Edward J. Larson’s American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of the Nation, 1765-1795
- Colonel Daniel Hitchcock in the American Revolutionary War Remembered
- Rebekah Harkness, the Scorned Socialite of Watch Hill
- South Kingstown at 300 – Part 2: From King Philip’s War to 1723
- South Kingstown at 300 – PART 1: From the Narragansetts to the First White Settlers
- The Founders of Providence’s Five Industrial Wonders
