About Christian McBurney

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

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

[This is the last in a series of four articles honoring the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Point Judith. This article is mostly from part of a chapter written …
Read More

[This is the third in a series of four articles honoring the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Point Judith. This third article is based on part of a chapter …
Read More

[This is the second in a series of four articles honoring the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Point Judith.  This article is based on part of a chapter written …
Read More

[This is the first in a series of four articles honoring the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Point Judith. This first article is based mostly on part of a …
Read More

This is a short history of modern pandemics, starting with the Great Influenza of 1918, and ending with the modern coronaviruses, SARs, MERs and COVID-19. Most of the last part …
Read More

In his first major foot race, the Boston Marathon in 1935, at the age of twenty, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown came out of nowhere. He was a poor Narragansett Indian from …
Read More

My book, Kidnapping the Enemy: The Special Operations to Capture Generals Charles Lee & Richard Prescott (Westholme, 2017), focused on the stunning captures of two major generals who fought on …
Read More

I am crazy about pontoons. Perhaps you could tell that from the chapter on pontoons in my recent book (with co-authors Norm Desmarais and Varoujan Karentz), Untold Stories from World …
Read More