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[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 …
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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 …
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With every election year there is talk of election fraud.[1] The 2020 elections are no different except that this year’s elections will be held in the midst of the COVID-19 …
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In the beginning of the 1993 movie Gettysburg, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the Twentieth Maine receives orders assigning 120 men of the Second Maine Regiment who had recently been …
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Alfred Niger, a Black voting rights activist from Providence, may have provided the final straw that broke the back of the Dorr Rebellion.  His attempt to vote in an 1841 …
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One of the most exciting European visitors to colonial America was the Very Reverend Dr. George Berkeley (1685-1753), who spent most of three years in Rhode Island. The rest of …
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Benjamin Quarles once wrote that the loyalty of black Americans during the American Revolution “was not to a place nor to a people, but to a principle, freedom.”[1] In late …
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This article is derived from a speech intended to be given on Rhode Island Statehood Day, May 29, 2020, in Pawtuxet as part of the Gaspee Days Celebration. This event, …
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After a slow beginning in the 17th century, the colony of Rhode Island came to dominate the slave trade in British North America in the 18th century.

Slavery by the …
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Posy Wiggins made helped make change happen. I became aware of her at an event at the wonderful Paul Cuffee School in Providence eight years ago when the …
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