Biography

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

[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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

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 …
Read More

Mary Francis Xavier Warde was the American foundress of the Sisters of Mercy (RSM). Born in Ireland in 1810 to fairly prosperous parents, she was orphaned in her teens. At …
Read More

Rebecca Chase Herreshoff was born on December 2, 1894, on Prudence Island, Rhode Island, the daughter of Captain Halsey Chase and Lizzie Kelly Studley. Also called Becky, she was …
Read More