American Revolution and Revolutionary War

On Sunday, June 7, at the Shaw’s supermarket parking lot on Taunton Avenue in East Providence, Professor Gordon Wood was struck by an automobile and seriously injured. He died at …
Read More

Griffin Greene of Warwick was a mechanical genius, despite having little formal education. His most impressive achievement: he made a water pump that was used to raise a sunken British …
Read More

[Note from the editor: The Society of Friends, informally known as the Quakers, in the seventeenth century had a major influence in Rhode Island, particularly in Newport County—the towns of …
Read More

The Providence City Archives houses more than 24,000 cubic feet of archival material throughout the city, and only 75 percent of it has been accounted for thus far, so the …
Read More

From December 1774 to March 1776, Captain James Wallace of the British Navy patrolled Narragansett Bay.  He had two objectives:  first, to minimize smuggling that evaded imperial custom duties; and …
Read More

Most of this article is an inventory of the items that Newport merchant John Manley owned at the end of 1776 at his modest home in Newport on Touro Street, …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

“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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More