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What Colonel Christopher Greene Owned (and Did not Own) in 1779 and 1781
3 months ago

What Colonel Christopher Greene Owned (and Did not Own) in 1779 and 1781

Christopher Greene was one of Rhode Island’s greatest heroes of the Revolutionary War, but his life was tragically cut short.  He was appointed a lieutenant in the Kentish Guards, an …
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Governor, Chief Justice, and Signer  Stephen Hopkins
4 months ago

Governor, Chief Justice, and Signer Stephen Hopkins

Stephen Hopkins (1707–85), statesman, pamphleteer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born on March 7, 1707, in Providence easterly of a former Indian village called Mashapaug. This site …
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Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episodes 2 and 3
4 months ago

Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episodes 2 and 3

“Long did I endeavor with unfeigned and unwearied Zeal, to preserve from breaking, that fine and noble China Vase the British Empire: for I knew that being once broken, the …
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Pokanoket or Wampanoag?: The Origins of Names
4 months ago

Pokanoket or Wampanoag?: The Origins of Names

The Indigenous people who first interacted with the Pilgrims in 1620 identified as Pokanoket, not Wampanoag. The widespread use of “Wampanoag” to describe this group is a colonial-era distortion that …
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Job E. Townsend Coffin Accounts and Newport Town Council Records: Research of African American Ancestors
5 months ago

Job E. Townsend Coffin Accounts and Newport Town Council Records: Research of African American Ancestors

Newspaper obituaries for African American residents who died in Newport, Rhode Island, in the decades after the American Revolution are sparse in number. When they were in the Newport Mercury, …
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Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episode 1
5 months ago

Teaching The American Revolution Using Ken Burns’s Documentary—Episode 1

Filmmaker Ken Burns has never been shy about tackling big topics, especially the conflicts that have defined us as a nation. In 1990, Burns’s epic documentary on the Civil War …
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Old Home Days in Rhode Island
6 months ago

Old Home Days in Rhode Island

Old Home Days was a mid-nineteenth century New England tradition in which former sons and daughters of a town returned to the town of their birth for a reunion. The …
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An Enslaved Teenager’s Journey from Warren, to Providence and Finally to the British Caribbean
6 months ago

An Enslaved Teenager’s Journey from Warren, to Providence and Finally to the British Caribbean

I came across the copies of documents set forth below by accident. They tell a short, but tragic, tale of an enslaved teenager/young man named Fantee.

I was aware of …
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Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916
6 months ago

Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916

[Note from the editor:  Last year I visited City Hall in Providence to do some research at the City Archives.  While walking through the building, I noticed a number of …
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Rhode Island’s Carnegie Medal Winners for Heroism (Last Names Beginning with A to D)
7 months ago

Rhode Island’s Carnegie Medal Winners for Heroism (Last Names Beginning with A to D)

[From the editor:  According to its website, “The Carnegie Hero Fund awards the Carnegie Medal to individuals in the United States and Canada who risk death or serious physical injury …
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