Image

Latest Posts

Wildlife on the Queen River
4 years ago

Wildlife on the Queen River

Five years ago, my wife Margaret and I purchased a home on Queen River in West Kingston, north of historic Usquepaugh and its Kenyon’s Grist Mill. In that time, I …
Read More

Amazing Military Museum Beckons at the World War II Foundation’s Headquarters in Wakefield
4 years ago

Amazing Military Museum Beckons at the World War II Foundation’s Headquarters in Wakefield

[From the editor:  This article first appeared on December 5, 2020. It has been updated by (i) deleting the article’s last paragraph and adding two new paragraphs, including about a …
Read More

Editors at Providence Journal Discriminated Against Irish-Americans
4 years ago

Editors at Providence Journal Discriminated Against Irish-Americans

In late 1841 a large group of Rhode Island reformers led by patrician attorney Thomas Wilson Dorr bypassed the reactionary existing government by invoking the revolutionary principles of 1776. …
Read More

Gray’s Grist Mill, Honorary Rhode Island Location
4 years ago

Gray’s Grist Mill, Honorary Rhode Island Location

As you know, the Online Review of Rhode Island History (aka smallstatebighistory.com) focuses on Rhode Island history. We don’t like going over a state line — particularly now during a …
Read More

The Search for the Site of the Great Swamp Massacre
4 years ago

The Search for the Site of the Great Swamp Massacre

Although the death rate of King Philip’s War, which raged in New England from 1675 to 1676, was higher among Americans than either the American Revolution, Civil War, or World …
Read More

The Newport & Wickford Railroad and Steamship Co., 1870-1963
4 years ago

The Newport & Wickford Railroad and Steamship Co., 1870-1963

Before 1830, travelers from Boston to New York rode by stagecoach down the old Post Road, or sailed around stormy Cape Cod, down along the unpredictable waters of Point Judith …
Read More

Viewing Ships in Narragansett Bay from Prudence Island in the Old Days
4 years ago

Viewing Ships in Narragansett Bay from Prudence Island in the Old Days

[From the editor: This article’s author, Rachel Chase Boynton, was born in December 1894, the daughter of Captain Halsey Chase, the founder and long-time operator of the Prudence Island-Bristol ferry, …
Read More

Prudence Crandall, Sarah Harris Fayerweather and Ann Hammond:  Their Pre-Civil War Struggle for Equality for Black People
4 years ago

Prudence Crandall, Sarah Harris Fayerweather and Ann Hammond: Their Pre-Civil War Struggle for Equality for Black People

In the first half of the nineteenth century, while most white New Englanders opposed slavery in the South, they nonetheless did not believe that their freed Black neighbors should be …
Read More

Rhode Island’s Contributions to the Founding of the United States, Part II
4 years ago

Rhode Island’s Contributions to the Founding of the United States, Part II

[Note from the author: This article is a slightly edited reproduction of my September 2019 welcoming address to the National Conference of the American Speakers of the House held in …
Read More

Rhode Island’s Contributions to the Founding of the United States, Part I
4 years ago

Rhode Island’s Contributions to the Founding of the United States, Part I

Note from the author: This article is a slightly edited reproduction of my September 2019 welcoming address to the National Conference of the American Speakers of the House held in …
Read More