Biography

I never met John Gordon. According to Rhode Island court records, John Gordon was a convicted murderer, executed in 1845 for the brutal murder of Amasa Sprague, a wealthy industrialist. …
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In 2003, a dramatic movie about a Depression-era race horse and his oversized jockey became a top box office film hit.  This story of hope and perseverance was woven into …
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This essay, on the character of Bishop Harkins and his career as an administrator, and on the bishop’s social apostolate, were written in 1978 for the projected second volume of …
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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 …
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These three ministers helped shape colonial and revolutionary Rhode Island. The first was the minister of the Second Congregational Church in Newport, Reverence Dr. Ezra Stiles. The second was …
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Edward Mitchell Bannister, one of Rhode Island’s foremost artists, was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada in 1828. His father William came from Barbados in the West Indies; his …
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European immigrants were not the only people who filled the Midwest with farms. Plenty of Rhode Islanders went west, too.

By the late 1700s, the population in Rhode Island, Massachusetts …
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[Rhode Island politics in the late 1800s and early 1900s was run by the Republican Party’s political machine. From 1884 to 1907, it was led with an iron fist by …
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In November 1637, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony convicted Anne Hutchinson of heresy and banished her from the colony. More than just a founding mother of Portsmouth, Rhode …
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The question of church and state is probably—not probably—is the oldest argument in American history. It was first articulated almost 400 years ago by John Winthrop, the most important figure …
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