Colonial

Born in Yorkshire, England in 1716 (some sources say 14 June, others say 27 July), Peter Harrison was placed at age twelve in an apprenticeship to architect/builder William Etty. He …
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Newport, Rhode Island, is graced with some of the finest works of America architecture, from the colonial period to the spectacular Gilded Age. Among the jewels of eighteenth-century architecture in …
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The name of North Kingstown’s own Captain Daniel Fones might be spoken in the same breath with as Thomas Tew, William Kidd, and Blackbeard. Fones’s skills as a sailor, his …
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One of the founding breeds of the Standardbred, the Narragansett Pacer has been extinct since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the Pacer was ubiquitous in colonial North …
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Death notices began to appear in America with the first newspapers. A community-wide extension of the early notices on tavern and meeting house doors, these first notices were sparse, containing …
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In one of his oft-repeated observations, Benjamin Franklin remarked “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”[1] But Franklin would have exempted colonial Rhode …
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In 1881 and 1905, two respected Rhode Island history authors made the claim that in colonial times, Godfrey Malbone, a wealthy Newport merchant, had constructed a tunnel from the coastline …
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