About Christian McBurney

[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

[Author’s note:  By the 1820s, circuses were becoming a popular form of mass entertainment. Traveling from small town to small town, they attracted increasingly large crowds.  The first elephants from …
Read More

Recently, there has been a spate of Rhode Island history books published by smallstatebighistory.com authors. These are in addition to Untold Stories of World War II Rhode Island (History Press, …
Read More

In last week’s article, I listed my top ten most interesting and amusing street names in Rhode Island. This article includes a list of fifteen honorable mention most interesting and …
Read More

Here are my top ten most interesting and amusing street names in Rhode Island. The names of the persons who provided me with the idea for the name and related …
Read More

As I poked around the photography division of the Navy History and Heritage Command the summer of 2018 at Washington Yard in Washington, D.C., I was hoping to find more …
Read More