American Revolution and Revolutionary War

Marian Mathison Desrosiers, The Banisters of Rhode Island in the American Revolution: Liberty and the Costs of Loyalties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021).

In 2017, Marian Mathison Desrosiers, formerly a …
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This article is being published on the 250th anniversary of the seizure of the Gaspee.

“In a certain sense, the War for Independence began at sea when patriots clashed with …
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In researching my last book entitled Citizen Soldiers, I came upon many references and stories of those American prisoners who suffered terribly in the makeshift jails of urban confinement or …
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In the early days of the abolition movement in the United States, by necessity, abolitionist work had to come primarily from white people because, before the American Revolution, most black …
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In the afternoon of June 9, 1772, the sloop Hannah, a Providence packet commanded by Capt. Benjamin Lindsey, sailed forth from Newport up Narragansett Bay toward its home port. Very …
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Esek Hopkins, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War, hailed from Rhode Island. He has two significant honorifics in Rhode Island. First, there is a statue …
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Last spring, Patrick Donovan, the talented and hardworking curator at the Varnum Memorial Armory Museum in East Greenwich, announced his discovery of  a handwritten letter from a formerly enslaved man …
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Benjamin Quarles once wrote that the loyalty of black Americans during the American Revolution “was not to a place nor to a people, but to a principle, freedom.”[1] In late …
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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 …
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In the 1970s, I lived in Newport, Rhode Island, and I had just built full-sized, operational copies of two Revolutionary War ships for the Bicentennial, the 24-gun frigate Rose (that …
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