American Revolution and Revolutionary War

Rhode Island’s role in the American Revolutionary War that raged from 1775 to 1783 is wide-ranging and complicated. It is yet another example of how Rhode Island’s history is way …
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I am pleased to announce the release of my latest book!

The book is entitled Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade (Westholme, 2022). The book …
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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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