About Erik Chaput & Russell J. DeSimone

The Providence author Catharine Read Williams often liked to refer to the tumultuous political and constitutional storm that swept Rhode Island in 1841-42 as a “tempest in a teapot.” …
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Historian Seth Rockman’s deeply researched and thoroughly engaging new book, Plantation Goods, deserves to be on the shelf of all those interested in late 18th and 19th century America. Many …
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Note: This article is the second in a two-part series on the career of civil rights reformer George Downing. Readers can access Part I at https://smallstatebighistory.com/george-t-downing-and-the-black-convention-movement/

My self-respect revolts at …
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Fear not; no antagonism of interest would be the result of admitting in common to your workshops the colored mechanic, of admitting his child as an apprentice.

(Appeal to …
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[Note from the authors: The essay that follows is a condensed version of a longer essay that is to accompany a major addition to the Dorr Rebellion Project (at http://library.providence.edu/dorr/) …
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[The authors dedicate this article to their friend and mentor Patrick T. Conley, the dean of Rhode Island historians.]

From 2010 to 2015, the publishing world was …
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No doubt about it, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a small, but dedicated group of African-American activists, including George Downing of Newport and Ichabod Northup, Ransom …
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In the final days of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress established an agency within the War Department that was to have far reaching powers in terms of setting social …
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More than any other Rhode Islander of his generation, Sidney S. Rider was in the business of history. Rider was the premier bookseller in Rhode Island in the later part …
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There is perhaps no better known expression from the American Revolutionary period than “no taxation without representation.” In July 1768, Silas Downer, a member of the Providence Sons of Liberty, …
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